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A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 



A RELIGION 
FOR THE NEW DAY 



BY 



..**"" 



CHARLES F. DOLE 
n 




NEW YORK 

B. W. HUEBSCH, Inc. 

MCMXX 



COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY B. W. HUBBSCH, Inc. 
PRINTED IN U. S. A. 



,10 






(\R 19 1921 

©CLA608741 



FOREWORD 

The author of this book will be very grateful if it 
proves helpful to ministers of religion, and specially 
to young ministers who wish to keep young. He has 
in mind, however, not so much professional ministers 
alone as that larger and more important class of 
men and women of whom the word minister may 
fairly be used to describe an honest purpose to add 
some value to the life of the world. 

We are facing to-day a momentous crisis in his- 
tory; certain profound facts are at last becoming 
obvious. Most people profess a religion in which 
they do not truly believe. They have come to the 
point where they are dimly aware of the unreality 
of their faith, and of the insincerity involved in this 
attitude: it hurts their consciences and lowers their 
moral health. The world is bound to come out of 
this state of mind either better or worse. 

On the other hand, religion in its innermost es- 
sence emerges from the crucible of the fiercest crit- 
icism through which it ever passed freer than ever 
before of those irrational and extraneous elements 
with which it has almost always been encumbered. 
A beautiful and inspiring faith is within the reach of 
all men who love truth and desire fullness of life. 



VI FOREWORD 

This religion, quite modern, yet with its roots deep 
in the most precious inheritance of man's past, meets, 
as never did any form of religion before, the most 
tremendous needs of ethical inspiration. It offers 
the most radical and revolutionary, yet also the most 
progressive, comprehensive, and persuasive standards 
of human conduct, ruling, with the dynamic energy 
of a universal principle, every detail of private or 
public life. It is as individualistic as it is social. 

The author, brought up in one of the most dog- 
matic sects, but happily while the note of sincerity 
still lingered in its teachings, had the unspeakable 
benefit of close acquaintance with a group of people 
of whom it seems true to say that their real religion 
was in " being good and doing good." Their sec- 
tarian interest was never so deep as their humanita- 
rian purpose. It was impossible for him, therefore, 
ever to divide the domain of religion from the realm 
of daily conduct; nor could conscience to him ever 
mean anything else than a " social conscience." 

To the youth born in the middle of the last cen- 
tury and eager to know something of the nature of 
life and human destiny, the idea of evolution, along 
with the scientific impulse and habit of open-minded- 
ness and intellectual honesty that made Darwin's 
writings so memorable, offered a clue into every sub- 
ject of thought. The fight with slavery and its 
actual destruction suggested the possibility that every 
mischievous institution in the world might be abol- 
ished and led us to be content with nothing less than 
the democratic welfare of mankind. 



FOREWORD Vll 

Meanwhile, forty years in the ministry of a creed- 
less church with a remarkably kind, intelligent and 
hospitable congregation have convinced the author 
that, as a rule, all churches, Orthodox, Roman Cath- 
olic or Liberal, have alike come to a parting of the 
roads; that their general attitude toward the great 
and vital subjects of the time is practically the same; 
that, with noble personal exceptions, they do not 
believe their religion and therefore lack the power 
and the purpose to be leaders of the new world move- 
ment to which every clear sign of the times points. 
They are all survivals of an older faith — not heralds 
of a new. On this score, the lessons of the war 
have been very impressive. 

It is the design of this book to set forth a mode 
of religion, already dawning upon many minds, 
which the author believes must under various forms 
serve now and henceforth, not for Christendom 
alone but for all mankind, as the spiritual gospel and 
working force for a humane and democratic world. 
Wherever it is applied it can without question trans- 
form life. Every step of success in the working of 
the new faith, every melancholy failure of the old 
surviving and bankrupt unfaith, constitutes a new 
call to press with all our might toward a spiritual 
reality so virile as to win all the peoples to believe 
in and practice it. 

It may seem that I should have said something 
about the coming institutions and ceremonies of re- 
ligion. To speak frankly, I care little for this side 



vin FOREWORD 

of our subject. Every living human movement is 
sure to adopt forms and create institutions to meet 
its needs. 

I am sure also that whoever comes to love and 
understand veritable religion will easily be able to 
interpret all forms and expressions of genuine people 
and adapt to his own use as much of what they say 
and do as he may find helpful. He will do this with 
their symbols and ceremonies, without taking them 
too seriously. He can find matter for humane 
recognition and sympathy in a temple or synagogue 
or the barest country meeting-house, provided the 
worshipers give him the impression of a decent sin- 
cerity. 

I am unwilling, therefore, to assume an attitude 
of antagonism to existing churches or religions. Let 
us see all the good there is in them : let us not despise 
our own childhood. There are many admirable peo- 
ple who believe that they can develop a better re- 
ligion out of the old roots. Let them do this wher- 
ever they can, provided they are able to tell the 
truth and not compromise their convictions. They 
may succeed in many cases. It is difficult to foretell 
the various methods through which the growing life 
will show its power. Let no one, however, be too 
certain that it is worth while to pour new wine into 
old bottles ! Let no one imagine that the spirit of 
religion must reflect itself through all time any more 
by means of pulpits and pews than by candles and 
crucifixes. 

Of certain facts I am sure. A multitude of people 



FOREWORD IX 

are scattered through the nation for whom the 
existing institutions of religion have no vital word. 
There must be an immense " revival of religion," of 
a kind quite different from that in which the churches 
deal, before they can touch the world outside. The 
church people have not enough religion to be able 
to communicate it to others. People are weary of 
being told to " come to church," as if hearing ser- 
mons or posturing in the forms of worship fed the 
springs of human life. Priests and preachers natur- 
ally enjoy their own services and sermons more than 
those whose part it is to answer with Amens. There 
are many men deserving of high respect who have 
little use for any conventional outward expression of 
religion. Of course a really rich and warm popu- 
lar religion would have life enough to meet the 
needs of the most various types of people. 

The world immensely needs religion — I mean re- 
ligion in the terms of faith, hope and humanity. 
There is no enterprise of human reform and better- 
ment that is not dying at the top for the need of 
religion. Political leaders, the leaders of the great 
social movements, the internationalists, leaders of 
great labor unions as well as masters of industry, 
lack the religion to light the way where they seek to 
guide others. They have not enough religion to 
understand democracy, much less to use its funda- 
mental principles. This is the pathos of " Bolshe- 
vism." 

I am sure that this condition is perilous: it does 
not presage a wholesome world for our children. 



x FOREWORD 

All kinds of people need religion, in the best sense 
of the word. 

I am sure also that most of us, whether we have 
religion or suffer from the need of it, must get to- 
gether. Religion is essentially social. Whoever 
has it enjoys it and wants to tell some one else about 
it. Religion does not permit selfishness and isola- 
tion; it urges us to expression, and most of all ways 
through social action. Wherever religion is alive 
and awake it hardly requires paid agents and min- 
isters. The great popular religious movements, 
like the spread of early Christianity in the teeth of 
oppression, have run like a stream; one man tells 
another; groups of people meet on their holiday 
evenings in each other's houses or in upper rooms. 
A certain amount of opposition has served to chal- 
lenge the chivalry and generosity that exist in every 
group of people. 

In our new time, with altered outward conditions, 
we still look for great popular movements, born to 
meet great social and personal necessities. 

I have no prejudice against organizations and in- 
stitutions, whether old ones re-created or new ones 
made to fit the new day. But all human institutions, 
like our houses, require the closest attention and 
constant repairs, or they are not fit to live in. I 
have no prejudice against paid officials, but we know 
that in the moment when a man thinks about his 
salary instead of the work he is set to do, the spirit 
of religion goes out of him. 

The very soul of religion is devotion, unselfishness, 



FOREWORD xi 

disinterestedness. Why is it that the success of the 
work of the humble Salvation Army in relieving the 
distress of the war is out of all proportion to the 
number of its workers? Is it not because here were 
men and women who obviously had no regard for 
money or anything except a single-minded devotion 
to the welfare of men ? In days of barbarism priest- 
craft and authority often captured men's fears; it is 
different now. The religion that does not flow out 
of devoted hearts must perish. 

Charles F. Dole. 
Jamaica Plain, Boston, Mass., U. S. A. 
Feb. 25, 1919. 



CONTENTS 

SECTION I 

SIGNS OF THE TIMES: HOW THE FACTS 
POINT 

OHAPTEB PAOX 

I The Defeat of the Current Religion . . i 

II A Religion Behind all the Religions . . 14 

III The Realm of the Spirit 25 

IV Spiritual Evolution : A Working Formula 37 

SECTION II 

THE COURSE OF SPIRITUAL EVOLUTION 

I The Natural Beginnings of Religion . . 53 

II Changing Human Nature 65 

III The Pharisee World 70 

IV The Superman, or Man at His Best . . 86 
V The Summum Bonum 99 

VI Two Levels of Life: The Great Adven- 
ture 106 

VII Evil: What to Make of It 121 

SECTION III 

THE VICTORIOUS GOODNESS 

I How to Handle Evil: The Irrepressible 

Conflict 135 

II The New Force 149 

III The Heresies that Hurt Men . . . .160 



CONTENTS 

SECTION IV 
THE NEW CIVILIZATION 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I Religion and Industrial Democracy . .175 

II Education for the People 193 

III The Tests of Good Education .... 205 

IV The Winning of the World 212 

V Democratic Government and the World 

Order 222 

VI The Gospel of Percentages 244 

SECTION V 

THE RELIGION WITHIN 

I Religion as an Experience 249 

II Why We Say God 262 

III The Eternal Life 276 



A RELIGION FOR THE 
NEW DAY 

SECTION I 

SIGNS OF THE TIMES: HOW THE FACTS 
POINT 

I 

THE DEFEAT OF THE CURRENT RELIGION 

Two vast institutions cover the world with their me- 
morials: one is the war system; the other is the cur- 
rent religion. The most enduring of all buildings 
are fortifications and churches or temples. Between 
these two groups of monuments the glory, the pomp 
and the heroism of human history is divided and in- 
deed shared. For they have rarely lived long apart 
in any spot, and they have mostly worked together. 
Battle flags have come to be the favorite decoration 
of the church. Priests and chaplains have marched 
with armies and helped to hold the forts. 

The Great War has forced slowly upon the 
thought of the world a strangely disconcerting ques- 
tion. What is the use of religion which lives at 
peace with war, sanctions war, helps to win war, and 

i 



2 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

prays in different languages to one and the same God 
to give opposite parties victory in the struggle to 
destroy each other? The poison of a deep skepti- 
cism lies behind this question. Where is the God of 
the current religion? Who is He? Can we name 
Him the " Father " of Men? What loving Power 
that cares for men could tolerate the horrors with 
which every land to-day has been stirred? The cur- 
rent religion not only did nothing to forbid this im- 
mense conflagration, but it blessed men on both sides 
who went to fight in the name of Christ, and it as- 
sured each fighting nation that however ill other 
wars might be thought, this war was " holy." What 
if the skeptical mind cries out upon this as the re- 
ductio ad absurdum of religion! Is it not at least 
possible that we are looking upon the failure and de- 
feat of the current religions of Christendom? Show 
us a religion, if you can, that has a decided and ef- 
fective gospel for a world at war. 

The force of the arraignment against the current 
or popular religion does not depend on the fact 
that this religion proved helpless to prevent or put 
an end to war. It had been a religion of easy com- 
promise with social evils. Indeed it had showed all 
the marks of the same Pharisaism which long ago 
had outraged the conscience and the straightforward 
honesty or Jesus. It said and did not. It was dog- 
matic where it had no right or need to be sure, and 
evasive, slippery and inconstant where it should have 
been unhesitating, decided and earnest. Does any 
one suppose that Pharisaism was a disease of Juda- 



THE DEFEAT OF THE CURRENT RELIGION 3 

ism only, that Christianity could not also suffer from 
it? 

There is no end to the evidence confirming this 
diagnosis of the current religion. The leaders of 
the churches are telling us, now that the world is 
aflame, that they had no idea that such a collapse 
of civilization was possible. The process of civili- 
zation had seemed to them to be going on very com- 
fortably. Did they not see how shallow the veneer 
of enlightenment was? Never had there been such 
preparation for a catastrophe. Several terribly sig- 
nificant wars had blazed up within a quarter of a 
century. Great Britain had taken part in one of 
them, enacting the most shameful deeds in South 
Africa. The United States, not fifty years away 
from the great Civil War, had set out on the road 
to empire by the way of a needless war against 
Spain, going on at once to soil her skirts with the 
cruel business of the subjugation of the Philippine 
Islands. Every government in the world presently 
felt the stir of the new and threatening force that 
our boasted naval power was taking on. The bar- 
barities of the two Balkan wars went beyond the 
power of words to describe. Meanwhile no great 
cause had ever been more feebly and half-heartedly 
supported than the cause of humanity versus the war 
system. In time of peace good people were not in- 
terested; when their own nation went to war, most 
of them found reason to excuse it, perhaps to call it 
" holy " ; this was no time to denounce war as 
wicked. But when would it ever be wicked, in an- 



4 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

other nation, when you could never condemn it in 
your own nation? Thus the current religion stood 
in no way prepared in any land to put its veto upon 
war. Moreover, the governmental authorities gen- 
erally depended upon the churches and synagogues 
to give the aid and comfort to any belligerent course 
upon which their nation had once decided. Ancient 
Rome hardly expected more of its priests and ves- 
tals ! In what way was this complacent attitude of 
the leaders of our current religion different from 
that of the priests and the Pharisees of ancient 
Jerusalem? 

Men say that the horrors of the Great War might 
have been prevented if the nations had been suffi- 
ciently prepared with armaments against it. A 
vital, honest, and humane religion, if our so-called 
Christendom had possessed it, would have prepared 
us against the war and forbidden it. The fact is 
that we were preparing for it, but did not know that 
it was coming. For war is only an external thing, 
the symptom of a disease deeper down at the heart of 
society. Our arraignment of the current religion is 
that it had not studied its own special subject; name- 
ly, our common human nature ; that it had developed 
no effective human sympathy; that while it made a 
pious outcry against " sin " in general, it did not 
recognize its own obvious faults and had no remedy 
for them. The world was proud and arrogant; 
was the church without pride? The world was 
full of divisive castes; had the church become demo- 
cratic? The world was quick to anger; had the 



THE DEFEAT OF THE CURRENT RELIGION 5. 

church learned what forgiveness is ? The world was 
selfish; were the current religion and its teachers 
conspicuous for disinterestedness? The world was 
quarreling; was the church notable for the friendly 
good will of its members? What permanent differ- 
ence did it make in any one's behavior, or in his inner 
character, when he had "got religion"? What 
actual effect had this current religion with its diverse 
types of worship, of creeds, of services and cere- 
monies, and its conventional ethics, to make a 
man honest, friendly, true-hearted, reverent, earnest, 
lovable, a good comrade, a noble citizen, a lover of 
men? The most fatal judgment of the popular re- 
ligion is the answer which it has to make to this 
practical question. The war, with its revelations of 
what a savage civilized man can be at his worst, is 
only an accident compared with that selfishness 
within the churches out of which war springs. 

Another symptom of social disease lay in the 
colossal drink bills of all the so-called Christian 
nations. How could we call the United States a 
civilized nation when it spent over a billion dollars 
a year for alcohol? We have supported this parlous 
condition almost up to the present date. But this is 
a case, you say, where the current religion already 
rightly cries, " Victory! " Without quite disparag- 
ing the claim we note how superficial the conquest of 
evil is, when it rests only on force and legality. Sup- 
pose we have taken away from men the opportunity 
to degrade themselves with drink. How far, by 
this compulsory process, have we reached and won 



6 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

over and lifted the essential manhood of our fel- 
lows? If we could only believe that the marvelous 
wave of prohibitory zeal which has swept over the 
world represented the sympathy and all-round hu- 
manity of those who vote so cheaply to impose their 
will upon the unwilling minority ! Is it the work of 
a vital and inward religion to club men into tem- 
perate habits? For surely no reformation of cus- 
tum or habit lasts long, unless it enters the fiber of a 
man's religion and carries his good will. 

The helpless attitude of the leaders of the current 
religion toward the immense social and economic 
problems of our age is not the least searching test 
of the quality of their religion. With notable ex- 
ceptions, which indeed hardly belong under the name 
of the popular religion, this attitude has been notori- 
ously unsympathetic, and especially in the wealthier 
and better educated communities. To the great 
cities and the universities came the cry of immense 
submerged populations — the cry for justice, for de- 
mocracy, for humanity. The answer given, unless 
indifference is any answer, has been most often in 
terms of fear, of suspicion, of race prejudice, of sel- 
fishness on guard against a less enlightened selfish- 
ness, of unfaith in God or man, in the zealous threat 
of public force in behalf of property rights. A new 
kind of heresy has been unearthed under the name 
of " socialism " ; namely, the too ardent interest of 
occasional preachers in proclaiming a doctrine of in- 
dustrial democracy. The modern preacher might 
play with the creeds on the easy terms of saying the 



THE DEFEAT OF THE CURRENT RELIGION 7 

pious formula, " the Lord Jesus Christ," but let him 
take care not to preach too persuasively upon the 
startling implications of the Golden Rule ! The 
church of America is said to be free. How far is 
it using its freedom to " do justice " and teach hu- 
manity? What large influence did it ever exert for 
any unpopular cause? Quite lately men have gone 
to prison for conscience' sake and in behalf of the 
freedom of religious teaching; did any free church 
boldly assert the rights on which, in former times, 
its own existence depended? Here again we find 
the essence of Pharisaism — fair professions and 
empty performance. 

The institutions of religion may appear to hold 
firm sway; their great buildings and endowments 
cost more money than ever; their aggregate income 
looks very impressive in the census ; their large mem- 
bership includes plenty of honored names; for thor- 
oughly popular enterprises such as financing war 
charities there is notable alacrity; the walls stand, 
but the foundations none the less are being under- 
mined. Many a time as one frequents the services 
of the popular religion, whether in some big city 
temple or in a little country chapel, the fatal ques- 
tion arises : Is not this a respectable survival of an 
earlier time? How often one is impressed by the 
scanty attendance, the listlessness, the lack of the 
sense of " a message " from the pulpit, the disparity 
between the numbers who go to church and those 
who are riding in motor cars or reading the Sunday 
newspapers in their arm-chairs at home ! Now and 



8 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

then a Billy Sunday draws a host about him — a 
labored and melancholy spectacle — a tour de force 
to galvanize a sleeping people into activity. The 
obvious practical question, urged by the pressure of 
economic necessity, returns upon the thoughtful ques- 
tioner: How useful is this current religion to modern 
society? What can it do, and what does it, to mend 
the spiritual health of mankind? How great a loss, 
if any, should we suffer if we proclaimed a morato- 
rium of a generation or two for these time-honored 
institutions? I have in mind two independent stud- 
ies of the church, one by a highly respected Doctor 
of Divinity, touching a group of different denomina- 
tions, including his own, in the town of his summer 
residence; the other by an experienced educator, re- 
viewing the history of his own old Puritan church 
for two centuries. In each case the result of the 
study was negative. The institution had failed to 
demonstrate a usefulness to warrant its cost ! 

I wish to speak in no tone of pessimism. I in- 
quire; I do not profess to make up a balance sheet, 
or to measure all the fine shades of value to which 
any kind of religion, however effete or unspiritual, 
may lay claim. By and large, I believe that the ar- 
raignment against the current religion holds; it is 
not a vital and aggressive, religion; it is not readily 
known by its fruits ; it does not succeed in giving its 
members any sense of peace, joy, security, added 
power. Many will frankly tell you that they have 
never consciously enjoyed an " experience of relig- 
ion," in the sense that one speaks of an experience 



THE DEFEAT OF THE CURRENT RELIGION 9 

of parenthood or friendship. They have no strong 
and hearty bond with their fellow religionists such 
as men once had in the buoyant birth-period of their 
religion; they do not know what the Presence of 
God, as a grand consciousness of infinite rest and 
fellowship, means; they are not sure even that God 
is; they are rarely so sure of God or that this is 
God's world, as to dare to do right, when the right 
is not the custom of their social group, or when 
the right is somewhat costly and threatens to be un- 
profitable. They almost never find themselves es- 
tablished in a resolute purpose by the known support 
of their brothers in the church. All this is the mark 
of an historic or decadent religion; it has fallen out 
of connection with the sources of life. 

A vital church ought to stand in relation with the 
thought of its age. It begins to die if ever its pre- 
vailing thought is antiquated and conventional. The 
current religion is out of gear with the thought of 
our times. A great clue, necessary to understand 
the marvelous processes of history or to construct 
a working philosophy, is at hand to-day in the idea 
of evolution. Evolution is not merely in the outer 
world; it is essentially spiritual. Religion itself is 
the growth and product of the stirrings, inquiries, 
experiences, and aspirations of many ages. But the 
popular religion still carries its medieval creeds and 
dogmas, offers the lip worship of an unmeaning re- 
cital of obsolete sentences — the Apostles' Creed 
and undevotional Hebrew psalms. It professes still 
to hold a theology by virtue of ancient authority, 



IO A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

as if there were no vast parable in the outer world, 
open at last to science, full of gleams of helpful sug- 
gestiveness as to the inner meanings of life. The 
current religion is still moored to the false science of 
the Ptolemaic astronomy and a preposterous render- 
ing of the first chapter of Genesis. Leaders of its 
churches who know better are fearful of breaking the 
unity of the church by thought-provoking discussion. 
Their own souls thus suffer atrophy. Meanwhile 
scores of rival sects already break the unity of the 
only real church that ever was or can be; namely, the 
men of truth and good will, the helpers and lovers, 
the believers and doers, the real poets, sons and 
daughters of God. Yes! The current religion is 
far behind all the best and most active thinking of 
our age. And millions of people are trying hope- 
lessly to live and do business in one world and con- 
duct worship in another and unreal world; they 
are trying to stay out of the universe ! 

Have not certain groups, however, the Unitarians 
and other liberals, succeeded in making their thought 
in religion tally with the thought of schools and col- 
leges? A few have tried to use their minds, but 
this is not enough in the realm of religion. Religion 
must carry the whole man along and not only the 
mind. The most correct thought about religion by 
itself would only be a new orthodoxy. Religion 
wants to be adapted to life. As we wish to show 
later, the implications of a genuine and vital religion 
are so immense and far-reaching that no man has 
any idea of them simply by his intellectual under- 



THE DEFEAT OF THE CURRENT RELIGION II 

standing of a few definitions, never adequate to de- 
fine the reality. What if the liberal, like others, 
merely repeats the great principles by rote? He is 
proud to have sloughed off the confusing doctrines 
of the popular creed. But who knows that the 
obscure dogma in the despised creed does not con- 
tain the hint of a living truth? 

The fact is that people are members of liberal 
churches, as they are of other churches, largely by 
reason of social affinity and heredity. What liberal 
church ever started with a purpose to find truth or, 
grander yet, to lead a new enterprise to bring u the 
Kingdom of God " to the modern world? For the 
most part and excepting individual efforts, liberal 
churches are very like other forms of the current 
religion. The same may be said of Judaism with 
its orthodox and liberal wing. Never have any of 
these groups actively set out to express and incarnate 
the soul of religion. The same survival of timidity, 
both intellectual and moral, the same distrust of 
putting their professions into practice in this actual 
world, the fatal doubt whether their religion will 
work, the human instinct to herd along with other 
men and escape unpopularity or responsibility, has 
appeared with like results on both sides of the vague 
line supposed to distinguish the vast orthodox hosts 
from the various liberal movements. Little ven- 
tured, little gained. Little outgo, little income. 
The liberals have not taken their religion very seri- 
ously, and they have therefore shown small persua- 
sive power to gather the people. Moreover, we 



12 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

have lived to see them, at one of the greatest issues 
of religious history, generally taking up the same 
war cry as that of the current religion, preaching the 
old-world method of violence, thinking to cast out 
evil by doing evil, invoking the name of Jesus to pro- 
voke warriors to fight, deriding " peacemakers " and 
casting them out of their churches — a perfectly nat- 
ural course, easy to understand, for those who had 
learned only to respect the great words of religion, 
without understanding their costly implications! 

Meanwhile, the world has suddenly developed a 
new science, new sources of almost infinite power, 
a new system of industry, world-wide complications 
of business and commerce, new problems difficult 
enough to swamp the mind that tries to imagine their 
outcome; the world just begins to wake up to the 
need of a real and practical religion, of such a 
religion as has never yet been largely known and 
practiced, of a religion adequate to fit such a crisis 
as this, and it finds itself with a current religion as 
helpless to meet its needs as if we were to try to use 
the old Mayflower for ocean travel. The world 
needed " preparedness," but not in steel or gold, 
in food and drink, in new chemical secrets, in en- 
larged forces of destruction. It wanted and must 
have a religion humane enough to match its great 
science, a religion rational enough to ally itself with 
its science, but, far more important, a religion vital 
enough to give a higher motive power than fear or 
warlike discipline or greed of gain or the hysteria 



THE DEFEAT OF THE CURRENT RELIGION 13 

of an inflated patriotism could ever give, for the 
counsels and conduct of mankind. 

Have I arraigned the popular religion too se- 
verely or done it injustice ? I was brought up in it ; I 
know it from the roots upward; I am aware of the 
values that it once carried; I would say nothing to 
break it down, if I did not see what ought to super- 
sede it; I would not willingly hurt any one's feelings 
who loves it. We might bear with it in further 
patience, if it would only be humble and face the 
truth, and tell the truth. But its worst fault is that 
it fosters pride and egotism; it asks men to " humble 
themselves " and confess their sins, but it does not 
confess its own sins. /It had its chance to lead men 
to new reaches of conduct, but it preferred to follow 
like a slave in chains at the heels of the warriors, the 
bankers, and the politicians. I leave the question, 
" Has the world any use for the current religion? " 
with a negative answer. It has failed and been de- 
feated. It is not good enough to repair. There is 
no land under the sun where an honest man would 
not suffer shame to undertake to profess it. 
' What ! " men would say. " The religion that was 
responsible for the Great War ! " The world cries 
out in its need for something more sturdy and brave, 
more reverent, friendly and humane. 



II 

A RELIGION BEHIND ALL THE RELIGIONS 

To say that the current religion has failed is not to 
say that religion has failed. It is not to say that 
Christianity has failed, if we might only know what 
the true Christianity is. It is an old saying that 
Christianity has never been tried; it has not been 
tried on any large scale ; it has never been practiced 
in earnest by many people. Neither has Judaism at 
its best ever failed. In most minds there is a haunt- 
ing sense that there is something valid in religion, 
if we could only discover it. What is this valid 
substance of religion? 

There is no more important question in the field 
of knowledge than that upon which we now enter. 
No truthful mind can bear to delude itself with a 
pretense of religion or a show of argument to estab- 
lish it, if it is not real. We have no merely academic 
question here. It is intensely practical; it bears on 
every issue of right or duty; it involves the secret of 
happiness, the improvability of humanity and the 
destiny of mankind. If there be nothing mighty and 
moving in religion, mankind loses its most precious 
asset. Worth would fall out of life, and worth is 
related to every social subject — to justice, democ- 
racy, civilization. What if man were only a some- 

14 



A RELIGION BEHIND ALL RELIGIONS 15 

what more intellectual, hungry, lustful and imperious 
beast? What then can you possibly make of con- 
science, duty and ideals? A venturesome intelli- 
gence may perhaps enjoy for the moment the sense 
of freedom from all restraint that comes in the hazy 
doubt, whether anything is real. But what if the 
mind had to accept blank negation as its answer to 
the riddle of existence ? 

We are by no means ready to venture any defini- 
tion of religion. We will not begin our inquiry with 
definition or argument. We will simply look for 
and observe the facts that lead to religion. A bril- 
liant philosophical teacher, Prof. William James, 
has been a fore-runner in this method of investiga- 
tion. We do not need to go so far afield as he went. 
His pathological interests as a psychologist led him 
into certain strange historic by-paths of study. He 
enjoyed the morbid things which concern the few 
rather than the many. He took up the company of 
the " saints " who " dream dreams and see visions/' 
He actually put aside as of little moment that " bet- 
ter way," open to every man, as practical as it was 
prophetic, with which the Apostle Paul at the height 
of his vision, showed what charity — that is, love, or 
good will — actually does for the humblest lives. 
Prof. James called his aristocratic and anaemic saints 
the " twice born." The ordinary religion was to 
him only that of the " healthy-minded." But most 
of us, if we are going to have religion at all, desire 
the healthy-minded and democratic variety. 1 

1 It is interesting to observe that many ministers of the 
current religion seem to have been impressed and comforted with 



1 6 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

Every reader of Marcus Aurelius recalls the chap- 
ter in which he relates the practical life material 
which he had received from a long list of kinsfolk, 
teachers, and friends. It is virtually the catalogue 
of the goods in his spiritual treasure house. He is 
not thinking of rank, fortune, station, gold, jewels, 
and palaces. His friends had made their gifts and 
contributions to him in terms of candor, fairness, 
justice, steadfastness, courage, dignity, benevolence, 
and simple piety. They had assured him of an abid- 
ing worth and reality behind the fleeting show of 
things. They had bidden him be a man to the full 
height of his stature. Here are facts about religion 
which, after hundreds of years, appeal to us as valid 
and vital. Such facts as these are the substance of 
religion. 

The straight-forward mind of Tolstoy, the great 
Russian humanist, seized upon just such facts. He 
found them in the lives of poverty-stricken peasant 
neighbors. He found among these people gems of 
honesty, friendliness, generosity, helpfulness, and a 
simple trust that some good Power ordered the 
world. He had found those who were not afraid 
in the face of the wildest storm. The beautiful 
little story, " Where Love is There God is," which 
Tolstoy translated and circulated for his people, was 
a presentation of this religion of the simple and 
healthy-minded. Every one loves such a religion. 

Mr. James' conclusion; namely, that there is some residuum of 
reality under the name of religion ! Had they never thought to 
look for it in certain beautiful and obvious facts under their own 
eyes? 



A RELIGION BEHIND ALL RELIGIONS 1 7 

What relation had it to the elaborate ritual and 
ecclesiasticism of the great national churches? 
Here was the veritable and verifiable religion behind 
the pomp and the orthodox name. In his little book, 
" My Religion," Tolstoy tells us the story of his 
direct, first-hand study of the brief New Testament 
Gospels. He had no use for the miracles or the 
dogmas, but he discovered facts, principles, and a 
way of life. His Russian peasants were leading this 
life. This discovery made a new man of him. His 
words ring now with the sense of reality. Here 
was something about which he could henceforth say : 
" I know." 

Let me give a little paragraph of experiences out 
of a boy's life a generation ago. It was in a small 
New England village, where the big Orthodox meet- 
ing-house loomed up on the village green along with 
the court-house — symbols of the eminent respecta- 
bility of the town. The boy recalls the dull preach- 
ing in the old church, the tedious Sunday School les- 
sons, the endless repetitions of the Life of Jesus, and 
the dreary prayer meetings. Was this religion? 
The church gave him no sense of the good God, but 
rather the terrible punishing deity into whose hope- 
less prison-house the nations continually went down. 
Yet here and there in this bare Puritan meeting- 
house were a few faces that bore the look of trust 
and peace, possibly at times of some secret source 
of joy. There was also to be seen there the cheer- 
ful, sturdy countenance of a certain clean and 
friendly farmer, honest beyond any doubt. Such 



1 8 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

" real folks " preached the silent sermons of religion 
to the boys and girls. The memory of a father, 
early devoted to the anti-slavery cause, whose relig- 
ion had made him fearless of death; the mother 
with her stern faith in the omnipotent Righteousness; 
the kindly true-hearted grandmother, who said noth- 
ing about her religion but dealt in its fruits; — here 
in the home was the boy's true church. Nothing 
could ever quite dispossess him of a reality that he 
had seen and felt. 

There came also, among other good gifts, an occa- 
sional visit to an extremely lovable heretic aunt. 
Here was freedom and an open mind, with sweet- 
ness and light such as his young soul longed for. 
Religion might actually make people happy! But 
how could this cheerful hostess to all kinds of here- 
sies be possibly saved? The question became the 
germ of a wonderful liberating thought. This good 
aunt's goodness must be of God, and goodness had 
no need to fear either in this life or beyond. So the 
boy's mind began to see where the reality of religion 
lay. Religion was that out of which grew all beau- 
tiful and friendly things; religion dwelt in the hearts 
of all good men and women. 

Now this was precisely the teaching of the simple- 
minded young Jewish rabbi who, when the man of 
the law asked him how to obtain " eternal life " — 
that is, the best life there is — told him the story of 
the Good Samaritan. It is the story of an outsider, 
a heretic who had eternal life, that is, pure goodness, 
and made it shine in the dark corner where it was 



A RELIGION BEHIND ALL RELIGIONS 19 

needed. Such action, says Jesus, is religion. The 
kind of man out of whom such action springs, as a 
picture springs from the vision of the artist, pos- 
sesses religion. 

But some one may ask, " Shall we despise the 
numerous outward forms of the popular religion? 
Shall we discard the conventional Christianity for a 
religion which we have to seek without forms, be- 
neath the surface, as men find gold, a bit here and 
a nugget there ? " We will despise nothing whereby 
men find the material of life. Life is the test: what 
makes and nourishes it? Whether a man eats rice 
or wheat or fruit, whether his food is raw or cooked 
does not matter, provided he flourishes on it. There 
are those, perhaps, who can find nutriment in grass 
or the bark of trees. Wherever sound health is, we 
bow in its presence. There may be enough religion 
in the barest forms of the grimmest creed, or the 
most elaborate ritualism, to serve some men's need. 
A church is nothing but the effort of a group of men 
to contribute together in sustaining the life of relig- 
ion. We have no wish to deny the use of the right 
kind of church. 

Meanwhile, however, we are free to find the marks 
of religion more widely than the disciples of any 
exclusive religion imagine. Thus we find the good 
Roman Catholic priest, as Chaucer finely pictured 
him five hundred years ago, ministering to the needs 
of the poor, staying men's faith, comforting them in 
the face of death, blessing little children. Is this 
by virtue of his consecration at the hands of a bishop 



20 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

or by his celebration of the mass? It may well be 
that his office and his emblems add a certain symbolic 
emphasis to his life and touch the imagination of his 
people, like the medicine that a patient sees the phy- 
sician measure out of his vials. But we know that 
his church is doomed if it fails to keep up its list 
of holy lives like his own. Neither can it live by its 
priests only. The great churches do not know how 
to produce the good lives. If they had known how 
to do this they would have saved the world long 
ago. 

Moreover, we are coming to see the growth of re- 
ligion in all manner of unconventional ways. In war 
time, at least, good Jews have made good enough 
" Christians." Who tries any longer to convert the 
Jews? Good " Christians " also appear outside of 
all churches, while certain small sects, like the 
Society of Friends, somehow produce the highest per- 
centage of sound wheat. No people have given so 
large a constituency of helpers for the abolition of 
slavery and again of war. Among unregistered 
" Christians " two names stand conspicuous, Ralph 
Waldo Emerson and Abraham Lincoln. What 
modern man would suggest that St. Peter was ex- 
pected to shut out these and other such men for want 
of being good church members? Not, surely, the 
preachers who dispatch their young soldiers by thou- 
sands straight from the battlefield to the " pearly 
gates " ! 

The number and variety of religions has been a 
frequent perplexity to simple people. This very 



A RELIGION BEHIND ALL RELIGIONS 21 

fact now opens the door wide to a new understand- 
ing of religion. There is no orthodoxy of any par- 
ticular religion; there is no single way of life; there 
is no merely outward secret of distinguishing real 
religion. But man is " incurably religious " in the 
best sense of the word. Religion is universal; it is 
the normal and natural development of manhood; 
it is discovered, like the early strawberries upon the 
summer hillsides, by a certain taste and fragrance, 
texture, color, and excellence, which satisfy those 
who have found it. 

It is easy to agree upon the chief elements that 
real religion possesses. One of them is kindliness. 
I mean kindliness as a disposition, a fixed habit, a 
purpose. Whose religion is worth anything without 
this? Another is conscience. I do not mean the 
harsh and crude conscience, keen to condemn and 
punish. I mean the conscience that bids us speak 
the truth and do justice — scrupulous justice at all 
times and to every one. Another element of relig- 
ion is gentleness, as against the prevalent pride, self- 
will, and egotism of men. Another point is rever- 
ence. I am not speaking with reference to profane 
language, or fear of divine anger. I mean regard 
and admiration in the presence of, or at the thought 
of, every beautiful or worthy thing and person. I 
mean Goethe's three reverences — for the things 
above, for one's fellows, and for the wonder that 
dwells in the feeblest things — the reverence that 
one has for a child, that forbids cruelty. Again, 
there is almost sure to dwell in veritable religion a 



22 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

sense of peace, rest, security, confidence, at least 
trust, unafraid of pain or death. " Shall not the 
Lord of Life do right? " Shall not the Power that 
brought us here care for its work? Not all who 
feel at rest and fearless might say as much as this. 
But the feeling is in their hearts. Religion is also 
honest with itself. What it proposes, it seeks to do. 

In short, religion takes up certain simple prim- 
itive qualities in us — those instincts that work to- 
ward " mutual aid " — and binds them together into 
a sort of cable of purpose and will. Whether or 
not the word religion goes back to a root that con- 
nects it with the idea of obligation, the meaning is 
there; it is a purposeful life-force, acting to unify 
every faculty in us. This beneficent life-force is 
doubtless one with what men call God. 

They used to say that the test of the true Catholic 
faith was this : It is that which has always been in 
all parts of the earth, on which all have agreed. 
Does not this little summary of religion come nearer 
than any creed to meet the ancient test? There 
is no decent or useful or social or happy form of life 
in which the possessor of this religion may not share. 
He is a citizen of the world, and could make himself 
at home wherever people had not gone crazy with 
violence or passion. Children and simple folk live 
this religion. We may say that Nature approves it. 

I have been speaking of religion in the largest 
way. I am not here seeking to suggest its mani- 
fold variations or the heights to which it sometimes 
attains. We shall have occasion later to trace the 



A RELIGION BEHIND ALL RELIGIONS 23 

ways of growth that religion finds for itself. I wish 
here to include widely and unite all who possess in 
general a fairly rooted and growing religion, at how- 
ever diverse stages of its manifestation. I have 
not been speaking of an abstract religion. I can 
conceive of no religion of mere qualities. I have in 
mind a religion of persons ; it comes through persons ; 
it creates persons. I mean by person that inner life, 
the mystery, the self, which thinks, delights in 
beauty, dwells with justice and order, purposes good, 
loves the good, is possessed with good will. This is 
a person, not in the sense of limits and separateness 
from others, but of fellowship with them; it is the 
sense in which the highest conception of God is in- 
finite Person. When therefore we think of religion 
we recall persons, the admirable father or mother or 
neighbor or friend, the glorious procession of the 
honest and useful, the teachers and helpers of men. 
We recall the hours when we too were real persons 
like these. Does any one want to sum up religion 
in one man — in Jesus? Let Jesus help men all 
that he possibly may. But religion is too great and 
varied, too truly personal, to be confined in the 
greatest of men. 

If now any one were to ask what my religion is, it 
is the religion beneath and behind all religions. It 
does not antagonize any religion out of which true 
men have received aid and comfort. But it helps 
us to understand and interpret every religion. Am 
I a Christian? Not in the terms of the current relig- 
ion, not in view of what Christians do and permit 



24 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

to be done. On the other hand, I come of the Chris- 
tian tradition. I can cheerfully use and enjoy the 
association of sincere people, called by whatever 
name. 

This religion so far has almost necessarily arisen 
to consciousness only in the few. It has character- 
ized great leaders like Isaiah, Jesus, Paul, Chan- 
ning, of marked individual character. Some of the 
" mystics " have known it. It has more often 
reached plain and humble people, rational and sober- 
minded, shy of superstitions, independent, humane, 
and kindly. Most of them have been only learners 
and beginners, seekers for truth, often hardly aware 
that they had a religion. But religion cannot 
flourish among scattered souls. We need heat, 
light, cohesion, power, effectiveness, development, 
not to be had in this crowded bustling world except 
by conscious effort, cost, and purposeful co-operation. 
There needs to be a body and brotherhood pledged 
together to accomplish great things for humanity. 
The times call for such a brotherhood, not to com- 
pete with the current religion, but to overtop it, to 
outgrow it, to fulfill it. As the growing humanity 
of the world is feeling its way through all narrower 
national loyalties toward some subtle and free inter- 
national organization, so the larger religion must 
embody itself in some world-wide form of free and 
generous fellowship. It cannot be content to be the 
religion of a few. It must be the religion of the 
many. To make it thus to prevail is the task now 
before us. All free and forward-looking men and 
women are called to its colors. 



Ill 

THE REALM OF THE SPIRIT 

We have had to use certain terms which imply a way 
of life, a whole realm of consciousness and conduct; 
this demands a special name. There is something 
in us which concerns things and grows out of mat- 
ter, but is above things and uses or directs them. 
We cannot see it, but this is no objection to it. We 
cannot see gravitation, or the electric force, or even 
matter at its last analysis, but we believe in these 
invisible realities and behave toward them just as if 
we saw them. Provisionally at least, the most skep- 
tical of men must treat them as real. What now is 
the most real and invisible of all the facts of life? 
We are obliged to call it spirit. We know no other 
word that expresses what we cannot see, and yet 
which does things and affects our vital motions and 
constitutes us, and is in each one of us the / or the 
self. 

There is profound mystery about all ultimate 
facts; we cannot define them; we can only say what 
they do to us or for us, how they impress us, what 
connections they make with other things or facts. 
In this sense we know as much at least about spirit 
as we know of matter or force. It is more intimate. 
If it is true that matter and spirit at the last an- 

25 



26 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

alysis are one and the same, doubtless then the word 
spirit is the better word to cover both of them. For 
we associate force, life, consciousness, intelligence 
with spirit more easily than with matter. 

Every one has occasion to think and talk about 
friendship, duty, good or evil character, justice, pa- 
triotism, liberty, good will, humanity. We mean 
nothing abstract by these words ; we refer to specific 
human actions. There is no bare justice, but only 
men who do justice; there is no humanity, but hu- 
mane people; there is no will except in living beings. 
But what is that in living men and women which 
makes us love them? It may be seen in the face or 
in certain acts, but it is never visible in itself. We 
love what we do not see in our friends. We call 
this reality behind the veil, which lights up the face 
with a smile, which is felt in the tones of the voice, 
the spirit. We do not even know it except through 
a kind of perception in us which is also spirit. " No 
one knoweth a man save the spirit that is in man." 
Whoever has felt the action of good will upon him- 
self from any source, in any act or motion; whoever 
has felt the movement of his own good will, going 
out in words and deeds to his friends, for his coun- 
try, in behalf of the principles or spiritual laws which 
serve all men, has known the movement of spirit. 
You cannot call it by any material name and be un- 
derstood. 

Let no one, then, say that he does not believe in 
spirit. If any one says this, he probably means 
disembodied spirits, of which we do not need here 



THE REALM OF THE SPIRIT 27 

to speak. Perhaps there are no such spirits; per- 
haps a spirit always takes form. My point is that 
we know the reality of spirit in ourselves and in 
others. There is nothing human in us which we 
know so well. What would a man be without his 
intelligence — an invisible thing — his invisible con- 
science, his will, his love, his real inner self — all in- 
visible? You love your mother; you love spirit. 
You love justice; you love spirit. You love your 
nation; you love a very complex spiritual idea; it 
could not exist without people to embody it. How 
can you care for your nation unless you care about 
people? 

There is a realm of phenomena, the things which 
we see and measure, with their deep mystery lurk- 
ing like an ocean beneath their surface. Is not this 
mystery behind things everywhere spirit? It surely 
appeals to our spirits, to our intelligence, to our im- 
agination, to our wonder. Let us continue, how- 
ever, if we like, for the sake of convenience, to speak 
of the realm of things. Let us also say, for the 
sake of convenience, that there is another realm, 
even more real if possible, which can only be called 
spiritual. Human beings are citizens of this realm. 
We will not say what other citizens it may have. 
We may not be ready to call the name of God over 
it. But we do use for it every great and high name 
with which men have ever tried to describe their 
idea of " God." We say of the realm of spirit that 
Power, Beauty, Thought, Goodness, Love dwell in 
it; that is, dwell in the beings which constitute it. 



28 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

Whether we are sure of God or not, we are sure, if 
any fact is sure, of this realm of the spirit. 

This becomes clear if you attempt to imagine a 
man as living out of this realm. Try to think away 
from a man all thought, all justice, all friendliness, 
all good will. What would he have left to char- 
acterize his manhood? Or, again, forget the whole 
spiritual history of mankind; forget the heroism of 
the heroes, the visions of the prophets, the love and 
patience of good women, the works of poets and 
artists; burn their books and pictures, destroy their 
cathedrals, raze their schools to the ground, erase 
the stories of liberty or reform won in the face of 
brutal oppression. All this and more you must do 
to get away from the realm of the spirit. It is be- 
cause war goes down so far the road to Avernus, be- 
cause it forgets, ignores, and destroys the highest 
values of life, because it bids men affront and deny 
their good will and sacrifice the fruits of the spirit to 
hatred, that we abhor war. 

Consider now certain marvelous points in the 
nature of spirit. I know how difficult it is to use 
soberly the mysterious word infinite. But the word 
certainly has a meaning beyond all controversy. 
We have to use it in mathematics and philosophy. 
I wish to use it in a simple and practical sense. Ask, 
for example, how far a man may prudently go in 
his affection for his mother, his wife, his children? 
The man who is a man will answer that he never 
dreams of such a question. His love has nothing to 
do with limits and prudence. It goes to all lengths 



THE REALM OF THE SPIRIT 29 

and beyond limits; that is, it contains the infinite. 
Indeed it has not " found itself " yet, if it would not 
go cheerfully to death for its object. 

It belongs also to man to pursue infinite aims. 
How much ought a just man to risk or sacrifice for 
his honor and integrity? No honest man ever 
thinks about integrity in this way. He has not come 
into his own yet if he can be bought, bribed, or 
frightened to do an injustice. How far must a man 
venture his fortune, his life, his reputation and popu- 
larity, even harder, the seeming welfare of his own 
family, and the good opinion of his friends, for his 
country or for the welfare of mankind? Ask any 
one out of thousands who, like William Lloyd Gar- 
rison, have staked everything that majorities hold 
precious, for a despised cause. The man sees the 
spark of the infinite in the cause of truth or freedom. 
That the majorities also have the same spark is dem- 
onstrated in the swift acclaim with which the next 
generation is apt to erect monuments to the re- 
formers, the martyrs, the heroes. Every one likes 
to see what the infinite in a man can do. Every one 
would like to possess it, at least in his ancestry! 

This is to say that there is an element of the in- 
finite in any normal man and because he is man. If 
we use ciry b, c, to express the worth of a man in 
measurable terms of labor and money, there is that 
besides — call it x or v or n — which denotes the 
unknown and immeasurable. It is the man's poten- 
tial value. You can never pay for the service of a 
wholly honest man; you can never be sure in the 



30 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

case of the common man when a burst of this higher 
value will gleam out to surprise you. We recall the 
story of the faithful black men in Africa who bore 
their good friend Livingstone's remains through the 
wilderness to the sea. Does any one think that 
they could be paid, or that a value in gold could be 
set to such faithfulness? At the last analysis a 
man's self-respect depends upon his belief, or hope, 
that he has a gleam of this infinite life-force within 
him. 

Another point to be noted in the spiritual realm is 
a new kind of unity. There is a unity, as of atoms 
or things, which can be counted up to a hundred or 
a million. A man's vote may be counted, as his 
head is counted in the census. You may hold that 
the manifold appearances around us go to make up 
a world, or even a universe of worlds. But this is 
not real unity. What we see, as the mark of spirit, 
is the unity that exists in a picture, in noble sculpture, 
in a poem or story, in a work of art. It says some- 
thing to you as a whole, carries a meaning of its 
own, is unique. This kind of unity constitutes a 
man. It makes him a person, apart and inimitable, 
like no other person. True, it is often an incom- 
plete unity, as of something in the process of making, 
as a play of which you only catch sight of a single 
scene. Even so, there is a hint or suggestion of the 
unity which ought to be there. 

It is only in this sense that we conceive of a real 
universe. Suppose that sun and earth and stars and 
giant forces and splendor of light said nothing and 



THE REALM OF THE SPIRIT 3 1 

meant nothing to any intelligence, would there be 
any real unity? Suppose, on the other hand, we 
could enter into the vision and interpretation of the 
man who first looked out on the world and pro- 
nounced the words : " It is good " ; of or that later 
idealist who said that " all things work together 
for good." This working together, this idea of a 
purpose, an end, or use, or message, constitutes for 
us a universe. The idea of a " first cause " is not 
half so important. Being of the nature of spirit, 
we must have a spiritual universe to live in. In this 
sense, all that we see enters into the spiritual unity 
as a vast parable or drama, composed and addressed 
as it were to spiritual intelligences. With this 
thought of unity, we may well find ourselves almost 
compelled to the faith in " God " (we care not for 
the name) as the unity, the reality, the infinite Per- 
son, the Intelligence, the Poet and Builder, in whose 
Will or Life we share life. 

I wish here, however, only to make clear the fact 
of the nature of man as a unity. You will often 
try to sum up some friend's character; you say that 
it seemed like a poem; that it carried a message of 
integrity; that it was an incarnation of unselfishness; 
that it struck a note of purity or fidelity. These ex- 
pressions are so many efforts to describe the effect 
on your mind of a spiritual unity. Most people 
must have witnessed some life which carried this 
impression. In such a case what can we say more 
than that all things have in fact worked together, 
as if by a guiding plan, like the vase under the hand 



32 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

of the potter? Such a life is no mere senseless suc- 
cession of detached acts or moments, like beads on 
a string, but every happening, the seeming faults of 
material, the mishaps, the sufferings, pains and pen- 
alties — all have gone to fulfill a design, to give con- 
trast and color, and produce at last the satisfactori- 
ness of unity. Such a life bears a priceless or in- 
finite message. Perhaps the meaning which piety 
used to find in its notion of a " divine Providence " 
was simply this fact, that the person, once beginning 
to grow into his own proper spiritual unity, discovers 
in everything some use which the guiding life can 
adapt to its ends. 

But some one will say that, where one life suc- 
ceeds and takes on unity, other lives fail; millions 
seem to have no unity, but are, rather, a fleeting 
series of happenings and mishaps. Are they only 
the material for the making of persons? It is no 
light question. The main reason, indeed, why we 
long for a better religion is that we may convey the 
universal secret of life, which some men surely have 
found, to which many men are now really near, and 
which multitudes obviously lack; namely, how to 
grow to the stature of men, of persons, each one 
like a jewel? Here is the need of a better religion. 
We cannot bear to put up with the sorrowful waste 
of human life before which the current religion 
stands hopeless. We have a gospel for all kinds 
and conditions of men. We have faith in the com- 
mon man as being of the same clay of which the 
most perfect vases are molded. So far as this faith 



THE REALM OF THE SPIRIT 33 

has ever been understandingly set to work it has not 
failed. 

This is to say that there is in the realm of the 
spirit, and not in things only, a marvelous principle 
of evolution and development. You have not to 
wait for the superman. Nothing which has ever 
been prophesied of him makes him desirable, 
whether to rule over us or to supersede us. We 
have yet to see what can normally be done with 
man as he is. What man yet begins to use all the 
faculties in him? We know little enough of the 
uses of matter and force. Where are the educators 
who are trying to learn and to teach what the spirit 
in man can do, enjoy, develop, transmit, or become? 
Education waits for the spiritual impulse of the bet- 
ter religion. How far can education and the educa- 
tors rise above the level of the dominant current re- 
ligion? "Who shall teach the teachers?" It is 
not the current religion alone that has failed. The 
schools and the great universities, to which we had 
a right to look for real wisdom in the face of a world 
calamity, have also failed. What grand saving 
word have the professed teachers of philosophy been 
able to give us ? What instruction of humaner con- 
duct has come from their well-endowed chairs? 
What earnest rebuke did the historians bring against 
our taking up again the degrading usages of bar- 
barism? 

The world needed the deeper implications and 
fresh application of the ancient wisdom. The world 
had opened before it a wonderful opportunity for a 



34 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

humaner and more spiritual growth. The great 
teachers and leaders might have set it along its up- 
ward way by a century's worth of quickened pros- 
perity and happiness. But as usual, the schoolmen 
like the churchmen, had no active faith in their prin- 
ciples, no vision of the nature and capacity of a 
spiritual humanity, no clear consciousness that they 
lived in a spiritual universe and touched the reality 
of the spirit on every hand. The times demanded 
live faith in the common man; the facts warranted 
a new faith. Noble leaders could have touched the 
hearts of the millions of men to attune their lives 
to the call of " humanity over all," instead of devot- 
ing themselves to the senseless old gladiatorial game 
of destruction. The current education, like the cur- 
rent religion, had produced no such leadership. 
The work is before us. 

There is a certain wonderful element of inde- 
structibility and deathlessness in the realm of the 
spirit. The body goes through phases and at last 
dies. Not so with that which constitutes the real 
self, the person, the ever growing unity with its 
everlasting stretch up and outward beyond the vis- 
ible a and b and c, toward the infinite, the x and the 
n. Here is the real man! Once established in its 
motion of growth, progression becomes its law. It 
has its home above the range of death, a bodily 
change. You see the processes of death; you never 
see the death of the man's spirit. The more you 
know of its nature, the harder it is to think of it as 
dead. The intelligence of a Plato dead? The con- 



THE REALM OF THE SPIRIT 35 

science of a Channing dead? The friendly will of 
a Wilberforee dead? The Christ-life dead? The 
terms never fit. There is not only no demonstra- 
tion of death in such cases as these, but the impress 
of the facts of the spiritual life move us the oppo- 
site way; the best lives shine out above death. If 
all of us lived this kind of life no one would ever be 
afraid of death. 

We thus approach a really verifiable idea of God 
and immortality also. This holds true without the 
use of dogmatism. We surely did not make our- 
selves, body or spirit. We are indeed children of 
the dust. But what startling contents and possibil- 
ities there are in the dust ! It contains in itself the 
element of the world stuff which our earth shares 
with the sun and the stars. On the other side, over- 
topping the mystery of the earthy structure, we dis- 
cover ourselves to be children and sharers of the 
life of intelligence, of beauty, of goodness, of the 
spirit. We are constantly surprised at the facts of 
a higher life which we discover in ourselves. What 
if the old poetic verse is really true, that " God cre- 
ated man to be immortal and made him to be an 
image of His own eternity " ! Call man child of 
God or not; he is evidently the child of the spiritual 
universe. The visible world may go to wreck; 
grant that the kind of change through which it daily 
passes, presages this. But nothing in the nature of 
spirit forebodes such a conclusion. Call God one 
or many, or forbear to name him at all, yet we men 
at our best share whatever characterizes the realm 



36 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

of the spirit, share every attribute that we can con- 
ceive in deity. In short, if infinite living spirit be 
the ultimate reality, we men are the kind of being 
that corresponds precisely to the idea of the children 
of such a reality, or universe, or God. Children, we 
say, not gods; on the way up, and at all stages of 
the processes of growth. The fact that exalts us 
thus also humbles the pride in us and forbids ill 
temper, contempt, blame, and impatience. We shall 
have occasion later to return to this point with closer 
insistence. 



IV 

SPIRITUAL EVOLUTION: A WORKING FORMULA 

Here is a brief formula touching human life, to 
meet the difficulties of skeptical minds. It is in 
three dimensions, as follows : First, this is a barbar- 
ous, or, if you prefer, a half -civilized world. Sec- 
ondly, it is a world on the upward way; that is, it is 
an improving and improvable world. Thirdly, it 
is every one's business to engage in this upward mo- 
tion and to help make it prevail. 

See if these propositions, one by one, do not hold 
true. In the first place, observe that our use of the 
terms barbarous and civilized express an idea of 
movement or evolution. I have already hinted that 
we have not yet begun to exploit the meaning of 
this familiar thought. We are used to it in its 
physical terms. But this is practically the least 
fruitful side of it. What if it is thus only a vast 
picture parable, the stage and scenery of a wonder- 
ful drama, of which we substantially know nothing 
by the mere show and procession of things, unless 
we catch the intellectual or spiritual sense, the out- 
come in thought, in ideas, in real life ! What if a 
Hebrew writer, Paul, no scientist at all, of only rab- 
binical training, long before Darwin, by a sort of 
spiritual vision, in a single eloquent passage in his 

37 



38 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

letter to his friends in Rome, came nearer to the 
meaning of the evolutionary process than most of 
the learned university professors of science to-day? 
They know a thousand-fold more of the facts of 
the physical story of the planet than he knew, but 
how few of them have fathomed the meaning of his 
words: " The whole creation groaneth and travail- 
eth together in pain." Wherefore? "Waiting," 
he says, " for the manifestation of the sons of 
God"; that is, waiting for the appearance of such 
men as Jesus was, and as Paul himself had become, 
such men as we also know in every city of America. 
Suppose that we have here the clue to the never- 
ending spiral ascent of the spiritual life; suppose 
the riddle of existence, no longer an enigma, is a 
moving drama of the victorious goodness! Then 
we can look on and see the pain and bear our share 
in it and be glad, if only the children of Intelligence, 
Truth and Beauty shall at last inherit the earth, if 
we too may have a hand in their coming. 

Please observe that we hold already something 
like this key to the idea of growth, touching our- 
selves and our children. The physical growth, im- 
portant as it is, is never enough. By itself it would 
be a stupendous disappointment. A child who had 
grown a body and had never grown a soul ! A body 
that could pull and kick and devour food, with as 
perfect and uninterrupted health as you please, yet 
without intellect, without sense of right and wrong, 
without symptoms of aspiration or devotion ! We 
are always on the watch for the growth of the spirit, 



SPIRITUAL EVOLUTION 39 

of the humanity. In war times parents face every 
conceivable possibility of destruction of the body, of 
torture, of long drawn out invalidism. But when 
the worst physical event happens and all is over, the 
most questioning mind is at rest when it is said: 
Our boy has won out; he has learned to be clean, 
to be faithful, to be fearless, to live and die like a 
man. This is the manifestation of a Son of God. 
That this comes true in war time is only the acci- 
dent, somewhat more startling and consoling in the 
fact of its contrast with a desolating calamity. The 
significant thing is that the youth has caught the 
secret of the drama of the universe, so that even the 
onlooker catches the idea. The youth might have 
died on the opposite side, or he might have been a 
derided " conscientious objector " fading out in a 
vile jail for his religion, or he might be conceived 
of as returning safe from the war to live a long and 
honored life, henceforth a true-hearted servant of 
humanity. Our satisfaction is that he has entered 
upon his heritage of spiritual growth as a man. 
This is his normal life. 

Let us agree, then, in the fact of spiritual evolu- 
tion, and let us not forget that this means nothing, 
unless it means that the life of man, and the world 
that he inhabits, and all things together in it, are 
significant. They are significant in that they are in 
some real sense purposeful. Let us not be afraid 
to use this word purpose, as distinguished from 
mere unpurposeful motion that goes nowhither. 
We are ourselves compact of the idea of purpose ! 



40 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

Nothing else is intelligent; we know purpose and de- 
mand it and find life finally intolerable without it, 
because we are spirit and not matter; because our 
home is properly in the realm of spiritual things; be- 
cause the spirit of the universe, whatever we call 
it, impresses upon us the necessity of purpose — that 
is, significant, upward movement of life. Not 
until a man has caught the motion of purpose — 
useful, beneficent purpose — have we any solid 
confidence or comfort in him. Our respect for our 
children is a respect for the hope and promise of 
purpose. 

Our first proposition is, that we live in a somewhat 
barbarous world. This will now seem less oppro- 
brious and disheartening. Barbarous is only a rela- 
tive word. We use it at first as we might use the 
word childish to describe infants in a nursery. 
They have to be childish at first. Blame or oppro- 
brium comes into the word only when children con- 
tinue to behave childishly after they ought to know 
better. So we use barbarous with two meanings in 
describing the world we live in. We do not use the 
word as the Greeks perhaps did, in contempt, to 
blame or deride the backward people around them. 
We use it almost cheerfully to describe the inhab- 
itants of Africa who have never had a chance to see 
civilization, before they have seen it translated 
through commerce into rum and rifles. How could 
they help being barbarians ! But we use the word 
also sadly for white men who proudly think them- 
selves w civilized," while they carry on the works 



SPIRITUAL EVOLUTION 4 1 

of barbarians, lynching negroes, for example. Each 
side in the Great War has called its enemies bar- 
barians. No German army, surely, has ever tried 
to civilize and Christianize war. But the Allies' 
boasted " rules of the game " have not civilized war. 
The Allies adopted the war system, they too de- 
scended to the same field of hatred, they took up 
the same cruel inventions — the submarine, the 
poison gas, the bombing of towns in air raids, the 
effort to feduce vast populations by hunger, the re- 
lentless blockading of neutral States, the forcing of 
unwilling youth into virtual serfdom, the suppres- 
sion of truth, the exaggerated blackening of the 
character of enemy nations, the persecution of mar- 
tyrs and heroes. Each side used barbarism to fight 
barbarism. Meanwhile, the church blessed and ex- 
tolled " our " war, added violence to its heat and 
enmity, called for the exercise of murderous might 
to crowd the enemy into the dust; the church prac- 
tically abdicated its work as a peace-maker, aban- 
doned its law of forgiveness, and became an adjunct 
of the war department. 

Thank God for the innumerable hands that 
tended the wounded, but alas ! they presently sent 
them back into the heat of the flame, and thought 
they did God service. The church did not know or 
teach otherwise. Let us agree not to talk about 
u civilization " and not to say " Christendom " be- 
fore we have consented together to put the whole- 
sale barbarity of war out of the world! 

My point is that we are yet a barbarous world. 



42 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

We all trace our common descent from barbarian 
ancestors. 

Grant now that we are passing through a stage 
or phase of human development; what happened was 
inevitable and necessary; it grew out of conditions 
that had run for centuries. We had inherited our 
churches and courts and other institutions from ages 
of violence and ignorance ; they did not fit our needs ; 
our religion was not our own but our forefathers' 
religion. It had not grown to match our boasted 
science, our hygiene, and our moving pictures. 
This is to say that the body and even the wits of 
our age had outgrown its moral character. Into 
what more dangerous plight can a youth, or a na- 
tion, or a race fall! Our fatality was that we did 
not possess practical intelligence enough to note the 
facts and treat them accordingly. The world had 
grown arrogant. It is not my wish to bring blame, 
but to state what the trouble is and to call now and 
henceforth for appropriate treatment. 

When I say that we live in a barbarous world, I 
wish to " take account of stock." I wish to mini- 
mize none of our virtues: we need them all. But 
we need specially to view our enemies : they are not 
overseas. Our pride of power, of big census sta- 
tistics and wealth, our natural conceit, our egotism, 
our economic jealousies, our suspicions of other na- 
tions, our exaggerated nationalism, our contempt 
and hatred, our self-will — these are our enemies. 
How can we ever drive them out of the world, as 
long as we harbor them in our own hearts and con- 



SPIRITUAL EVOLUTION 43 

done them? And how can we have a true civiliza- 
tion for our children while these enemies govern and 
distract the nations? Therefore I say: Let us be 
honest and lay our claim only to civilization as a 
prize yet to be won, doubtless at great cost. 

I say all this for a positive purpose. Our days 
of " humiliation and prayer " have no use unless, 
cutting down to the bone, we build our self-respect 
out of the clean blood of a friendly humanity. We 
cannot live decently and do our work with effect, 
unless we possess self-respect. Let us hearten our- 
selves for our work. Like the giant Antaeus, we 
touch the earth where we belong to renew our 
strength, not to continue to lie in the dust. 

I venture now to set forth the most optimistic 
proposition that man can believe. I maintain that 
this barbarous world, with all its chaos and injustice, 
is on its way up toward the light. This is to claim 
that the world is growing better. I am aware how 
much sullen skepticism there is about this. I know 
what formidable facts may be cited against it. A 
time of war does not look propitious for creeds of 
hope. I appeal not only to facts, but also to certain 
significant guiding lines of human development 
which emerge from the facts, not less but more 
clearly than ever before, in spite of the war. 

Let us take a long imaginary leap backwards as 
far as the geologists can see. Life, intelligence, 
consciousness had not yet come into manifest form. 
Unintelligent darkness brooded over the earth. Let 



44 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

us next look in on the earth at whatever time man 
first appeared. Here in the welter of brute life is 
a new kind of creature; something wonderful has 
happened. He can use language, think, study, con- 
trive, combine with others, know mother love. No 
Rousseau, however, wants to-day to return to keep 
house with this primitive man in his cave, to hunt 
for food with him, to fight lions and tigers and 
snakes, to worship his fetishes. 

Come down now, no one knows how many thou- 
sands of years, and establish another point of per- 
spective. We find cities and temples, laws and a 
certain order, ships on the sea, curious forms in 
bronze and iron, poems and art, great groups of 
men bound in society, filling empires. We find be- 
sides, something greater yet, since that earlier time 
of the cave man. An idea of righteousness has en- 
tered the world! Here and there are men of in- 
tegrity, magnanimous and purposeful men. Such 
men stand out at the beginnings of the authentic his- 
tory of every people. Abraham, Moses, Isaiah are 
only names out of one little but wonderfully signifi- 
cant nation. Kindliness has blossomed out into the 
lives of not a few Ruths and Naomis, faithful unto 
death for love's sake. There are men who will die 
for one another. David sitting over against the 
beleaguered wall in Bethlehem had such men about 
him. There are fathers and brothers and husbands 
like this. Behold here a rise of the tide of life on 
the planet ! It means more to come. 

Make a stand now at the lifetime of Jesus. No 



SPIRITUAL EVOLUTION 45 

matter whether he or some other man was first to 
proclaim a doctrine of brotherhood and humanity: 
no matter whether the idea of forgiveness had al- 
ready come before him. His name stands for the 
dawn of a new spiritual era. Here is a man, and 
no feeble man either, who carries the notion of good- 
ness to the heart of our modern world; here is that 
which we call in some meaningful sense the love of 
God. The man possessing it knows how to play 
his part with confidence against the blows of ill for- 
tune and become stronger; possessing it, any man 
now knows how to forgive, or better yet, not to have 
enemies. And this kind of man is able to go to his 
death unafraid. 

Had you never before seen or known about spirit 
and the life of the spirit, seeing this kind of man 
you would have to own that you know now what 
spirit is. If only one human life had touched you 
with the fact of this secret, you would have a new 
thrill of experience ; like a man who has set out some 
new kind of tree and, at last tasting its fruit, might 
say: I know now what a peach is. Do you im- 
agine that the first cave man just erecting himself 
above the earth, had ever seen such a fruitage of the 
tree of life as this new type of man, whom we may 
well dare to call a son of God ! There is a new ad- 
vancement of life as soon as this type appears. 

This advance is no less, but even more remark- 
able, if you cite the cruel deeds and wicked people 
who have been the contemporaries of the new and 
coming man. This barbarism, this suffering, this 



46 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

poverty, is not significant: animalism has always 
been in the world. The wonderful fact is that we 
see the new life of man, rising right out of the an- 
cient barbarism, overtopping it, victorious, and per- 
fectly safe and indestructible in the midst of it. 
This type has come to stay. You cannot kill it; de- 
stroy it in one place and you may be sure of presently 
seeing it flaming out somewhere else. It is rooted 
in nature; it is the work of the arch-poet of creation; 
you are going to see more and ever more of this 
kind of men and women. By and by an irresistible 
demand will set in for them. The demand heralds 
a growing supply. 

Come now to this age of the greatest war in all 
history — the blackest work of barbarous man. 
The test of the spiritual health of a people is the 
volume and the purity of the humanity among them. 
Who cannot see arising out of the bloody scenes of 
the war a marvelous demonstration of the religion 
beneath all the religions, that consists in kindliness, 
mutual aid, sympathy, the desire to do justice, the 
simple faith in the victorious goodness and the will 
to obey it ! The horrid war shows by contrast what 
one day will destroy war. It comes to many minds 
as a sort of revelation of humanity. It has ap- 
peared in especially beautiful forms in the United 
States, in England, in France. There is every likeli- 
hood that it has appeared also among the plain Ger- 
man people and the Russians. Leaving out of ac- 
count here the failure of untaught multitudes to see 
the inhumane nature of war, confining our attention 



SPIRITUAL EVOLUTION 47 

to the simple and whole-hearted efforts of an un- 
known number of people to show mercy, to meet 
immense needs, to join hands with others in a com- 
mon endeavor represented to them as both patriotic 
and democratic, to vindicate their ideals in the only- 
way which most of them saw possible, to undertake 
in the name of duty disgusting kinds of service which 
they were bidden in no way to question, when did 
ever the world see a more wonderful display of the 
great human qualities which lie close to the heart of 
religion? When were ever so many hands stretched 
out to soldiers' camps to keep the boys' lives clean, 
sweet, and temperate? When was money so poured 
forth in gifts to maintain hospitals and well-fur- 
nished centres of recreation? These facts are all to 
the good, and very significant. They do not render 
war less barbarous, but they display " the soul of 
good in things evil." They hardly belong to the 
credit of ministers, teachers, philosophers, states- 
men, who owed the people both wiser and nobler 
leadership. But they demonstrate an unexpected 
wealth of natural religion in the common man. The 
Christ type is here. 

So far now from saying: See what an occasional 
war may do to freshen up human life ! — we say the 
opposite. This badly needs to be said. If there 
had been more humanity — that is, real religion — 
there would have been no war. If there had been 
more sympathy, not with " allies " alone, but with 
all people as our friends; if there had been not 
merely a frantic burst of devotion for war time, but 



48 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

— what must yet come — a genuine devotion to the 
service of man for all time, if there had been moral 
courage to think straight and speak fearlessly, if 
there had been an equal zeal to do justice as well as 
the rather easy willingness to compel others to do 
justly, if the moral forces of the nation had been half 
as faithfully led by truth, fairness, and modesty as 
they were hustled and conscripted by the pride of 
the strong, this common fund of native goodness 
would have risen into heights of such wisdom and 
effectual good will as to have set the world forward 
by the value of a hundred years. 

We must not be so stupid as to make war glori- 
ous; we must call it what it always is, a calamity, 
like the famine or flood or pestilence, only more pre- 
ventable by the will of man. War only calls out 
goodness as a conflagration or any other misfortune 
does. It reveals heroes, because heroes are there 
waiting to be revealed. Physical courage is always 
plentiful; most healthy creatures possess it. Do 
not claim yet that modern men hate to fight; the 
brutal part of us never hates battle. The 
brutal part of human society will long be easily 
tempted to fight. The courage of the new age is to 
refuse to fight, to do something more humane and 
effective. The proof that man is on the way up 
from barbarism will henceforth be measured by this 
more splendid courage, which stands forth to forbid 
war altogether. 

Some say that the world has been lately growing 
corrupt with wealth and luxury. I think they are 



SPIRITUAL EVOLUTION 49 

wrong. The world had never been clean, humane, 
unselfish. Only the few ever possessed wealth or 
luxury. Neither does wealth necessarily work to 
corrupt men more than poverty does. The war 
simply disclosed what careful watchers of the habits 
and manners of the nation had already seen; namely, 
that there had been quietly growing everywhere the 
beautiful and simple fruitage of the spirit. There 
had been humble but real homes and noble home 
teaching; in many a neighborhood or village virile 
characters in the persons of brave and infinitely 
faithful women, of youth more noble than the 
boasted knights of chivalry had been developed. 
Thousands of witnesses could be summoned to tes- 
tify to such illustrious facts. Go back with your 
measuring rod, study the story of each century and 
each province, and find, if you can, a time or place 
of which you may prove so great and clean a record 
of men and women who have lived the simple life 
as you will find here in America in this startling 
period of the Great War. Not a century ago, not 
in the early New England, not in the fourteenth 
century, not in the so-called ages of faith, not in 
the time of the apostles, or the prophets of Israel. 
They were too few, but where had there ever been 
so many? 

There is nothing so effective as the divine urgency 
that works to produce good men. Be assured that 
as soon as only a somewhat larger percentage of 
such people appear as we all have known, with a little 
clearer vision caught from worthier leaders, they 



50 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

will know how to bring the secret of their religion, 
not merely to dissolve the halo of respectability in 
which antiquated churchmen have hitherto invested 
the barbarous war system, but also to abolish every 
kind of oppressive abuse which our awakened eyes 
are finding in the way of the march of men to the 
goal of their manhood. 1 

Let us agree then, though we live in a barbarous 
world, that it is a world on its way upward. It is a 
better world than it ever was; there is more human- 
ity in it and therefore more vision of God; there is 
more and not less promise in it; that is, more to make 
it worth while to live. Let no real man sit down 
and despair of the victorious goodness, or the im- 
measurable possibilities of human destiny. We are 
beginning only to use them, as they exist in " the 
common man." Our key thought is a drama of 
spiritual evolution. Do not expect a progress and 
betterment through the mere manifestation and ac- 
cumulation of things; expect spiritual results 

1 1 may seem to some to refer too often to the fact of war as 
the master evil. I do this because the war system, whether under 
the name of militarism or any other name, happens in our age to 
obtrude itself as the special obstacle in the way of spiritual civ- 
ilization. No one knows how subtly rooted and obstinate it is. 
I do not stress the colossal cost in life and treasure so much a9 the 
fact that it sums up in itself and symbolizes the worst vices of 
the untamed man grown strong — his arrogance and selfishness — 
more fatal now than ever for being dressed up in the garb of law 
and authority and taking the name of democracy. Through the 
use of war the pride and selfishness of the few still make the 
many their dependents, fasten themselves upon empires, capture 
majorities, and split the world with fear and enmity. Our fathers 
found African slavery across their path and they called it the 
" sum of villanies." We face the same villanies under the name 
of war. This is for us "the irrepressible conflict." 



SPIRITUAL EVOLUTION 5 1 

through the growth of persons, like sons of God, 
using and controlling things. 

Our third proposition follows as a matter of 
course; it is a personal appeal. We are here each 
to do his part to make the right prevail, to bring the 
ideal things to pass, to carry continually the message 
of larger good will. This is the meaning of every 
man's life. There is no real or satisfying life short 
of this. Nothing else gives it significance. Only 
this makes a man happy; only this unifies his facul- 
ties and raises his otherwise petty experiences into 
power, dignity, and beauty. This kind of life lifts a 
man from a pagan or provincial to be a citizen of 
the universe. 



SECTION II 

THE COURSE OF SPIRITUAL 
EVOLUTION 

I 

THE NATURAL BEGINNINGS OF RELIGION 

We no longer think of religion as revealed once for 
all, ready-made and perfect. It comes by processes 
of growth, like everything else human. Even if it 
is above man, it has to fit the state of mind in which 
man lives. It has to begin as man begins, in vague 
feelings and wonder. It cannot be thoughtful till 
at least some men begin to think. It cannot inspire 
conduct till men have learned through suffering 
from oppression and cruelty to see their way toward 
happier conduct. How many people who speak 
the name of God mean the same God that James 
Martineau, or Theodore Parker or Channing meant? 
What modern men mean the same as Jesus meant, 
or Isaiah? Do not Christians still worship a war- 
God? The fact is that no one can have a religion 
that does not measurably fit the growth of the man. 
He cannot hold another man's religion. 

We have shown that the current religion does not 
fit the needs and the thoughts of our times. We 

53 



54 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

have also seen that a better religion is already here. 
It is springing forth like the new and sturdy growth 
about an old decaying stump. It appears in un- 
expected places, as if it grew from seeds that the 
birds have dropped. Sometimes its seeds have 
fallen upon stony places. It has not yet come to its 
strength and beauty, except in individual lives. We 
only begin to see what it will grow to, when once 
it emerges from the individualism of isolated lives, 
and becomes a fellowship and brotherhood of all 
loyal-hearted men and women, devoted as an irre- 
sistible force to civilize the earth. We shall gain 
confidence in this nobler future by tracing the path- 
way of man's spiritual evolution. 

Life always comes in by varied stages or periods. 
There are chapters in the book of life, like the 
changing scenes and acts in the course of a drama. 
Nature is always taking us by surprise. If the great 
moving energy is always the same — of which we 
can hardly be sure — yet the effect is rhythmic and 
seasonal — summer and winter, " first the blade, 
then the ear, then the full corn in the ear." There 
are endless hidden possibilities in the universe and 
therefore in man, its child. What man uses half 
his powers? Before any man or before the race a 
new epoch may suddenly open. This is especially 
true of the life of the spirit, of the affections, of 
religion. 

There are at least four fairly distinct epochs or 
periods in man's spiritual development. In each 
successive period there is something new that was 



THE NATURAL BEGINNINGS OF RELIGION $5 

not present except as concealed in embryo, in the 
stage below. 

Of course, we all begin beyond our recollections 
in the shadow land of infancy. The common in- 
heritance of the animal world is back of us. Is the 
human nature beastly and brutal? How can it be 
otherwise, seeing that innumerable traits of our 
earthy origin are twisted together in us ! We draw 
our breath from the time aeons ago, before the man 
had arrived. It has been said: " Scratch a Russian 
and you find a Tartar." Make this universal: Rub 
any man the wrong way and you awaken the animal. 
This is " the old man " of whom Paul wrote. He 
wrote bitterly, blaming himself for an inevitable 
fact of life. It is the glory of the man who is to 
be, not that the animal has died, but that the man 
" knowing himself," as Socrates said, controls and 
uses the animal. Browning has the truth of it: 

" Nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh helps soul." 

But even in baby life, strangely feebler and more 
helpless than any other animal's infancy, there come, 
as every parent knows, foregleams and intimations, 
if not of immortality, of the wonderful possibilities 
of the coming man. What other young creature 
smiles and laughs as your baby does? What other 
creature puts forth such tendrils of intelligence, 
or a more determined will to stand and walk? 
Neither does any one blame the little child for his 
thunder-storms of anger or his sullen moods of ob- 
stinacy. Even the theologians had to fix the blame 



56 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

for these childish outbreaks on our distant fore- 
father Adam ! 

So much for the hazy beginnings of life. The 
origins of the world and all things in it are neces- 
sarily surrounded with the mists. Of what possible 
use would it be to remember infancy? When, now, 
does a child pass up out of this innocent period into 
the next stage of its spiritual growth? There 
comes a time when you blame the child, and, what 
is more important, the child accepts blame. Some- 
thing new has happened to him. To sin is to incur 
blame. What else is it? It is doubtless the dawn 
of self-consciousness. The disobedient or willful 
child has at first no sense of offense; but the same 
child presently feels somehow, like one groping in 
the dark, an alteration in the behavior — the looks 
and tones — of those around it. Disobedience 
changes the bearings of life and puts the child out- 
side good society. Disobedience — that is, unsocial 
conduct — checks the flow of the social life. 

Now, the spiritual life has its birth when this 
social consciousness, the inner feeling of self, as dis- 
tinguished from any other mode of feeling — of self 
as related to other selves — wakes up in us. This 
consciousness of self — the sense that I am — is one 
of the ultimate mysteries. Where can we possibly 
place it, except in the terms of the spirit? It is es- 
sential to life, and yet invisible and immeasurable — 
not a thing at all, and yet the most undeniable of 
facts. The scientific investigator is as much baffled 
to account for it as any of us. Try to define it, and 



THE NATURAL BEGINNINGS OF RELIGION 57 

you have only shifted your question from one set 
of words to other and probably harder words. 
Why not leave it, where it belongs — a form of 
spirit, a manifestation of the universe life or God? 
It is through the unfolding compass of this myste- 
rious consciousness that the tiny groping child will 
some day weigh the stars and commune with God 
and command a new world. 

We say that the child passes through infancy into 
the moral or spiritual realm — a quite new stage of 
life. No one can say just how or when the change 
comes. Nature, on the edge of the widest differ- 
ences, draws no sharp lines. Nature blends her 
colors and proceeds by subtle gradations. Every 
new birth is heralded by premonitory symptoms; it 
never translates the new life into immediate fulfill- 
ment. Few can probably recall the day when they 
first knew themselves as full and responsible selves. 
Even so, was there no twilight zone on the uncon- 
scious side of that red-letter day? With most of 
us, too, the first gleams of the conscious will are apt 
to suffer strange lapses into the earlier darkness. 
Nevertheless, each new growth of the soul — each 
vital experience — carries it up above ground, as it 
were, into the moral realm. The conscious moral 
realm is as different a place from that where life 
began as daylight from darkness. You find nothing 
in the most intelligent animals that corresponds to 
this change that comes early in the career of the 
man. We measure the child as more or less normal 
according to the distinctness of the change through 



58 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

which responsible self-conscious will is evolved in 
him. We may say that by five or six years of age 
the moral life ought fairly to have begun. 

This new period of growth does not seem at once 
to be a great boon to the child itself or any one else. 
It is a period of uncertain and tedious experimenta- 
tion. Few parents or teachers know how to give 
the child valid help. Is it perhaps necessary that 
he should try to find out for himself what he can do 
with his newly discovered " knowledge of good and 
evil " ? How far can he assert himself over the 
lines of disobedience? How important, or even 
dangerous, can he make himself in his small sphere 
of influence? He has found his way into the wil- 
derness. What resources, what strange fruits, what 
tingling possibilities of adventure are here? 

We are not far astray in calling this the pagan 
period. Most of us begin it as little barbarians. 
I use these words in no odious sense. The only odi- 
ous pagans and barbarians are the belated and so- 
phisticated ones. The natural savage or barbarian 
has all kinds of good human qualities. Travelers 
who know him best represent him as companionable 
and often affectionate; as capable of splendid loyalty, 
brave and exceedingly patient, religious too in a dim 
way, with notions, perhaps, of the Great Spirit; as 
very susceptible to good leadership. These things 
may be said of boys and girls. Show them your 
best side and they answer to it; they can also play 
the part of the savage at short notice. Every fac- 
ulty to make trouble is in them — untamed appetites, 



THE NATURAL BEGINNINGS OF RELIGION 59 

ugly passions, sullen resentments, greedy selfishness, 
queer superstitions. Do you always love to hear 
them " say their prayers"? How much like older 
people — or heathen — they are with their " vain 
repetitions "I At their worst, however, they are 
never so much to blame as those older people who 
lose their temper and become pagan, just when 
children need firm and friendly hands to steady 
them. 

In general, the child, like the pagan, lacks defi- 
nite purpose or aim. He sways and wavers in his 
moods; he is good and bad, kindly and cruel by 
turns; he is loving and lovable, with little con- 
stancy; he is capable of shocking outbursts of pas- 
sion, or deeds of shame; his morality is not yet his 
own so much as the tribal or group or family or gang 
morals, which may shore him up for the time. This 
is the way of nature. The child learns to walk or 
climb or swim by experiments and failures. No one 
else can do it for him. Neither can he ever become 
a man except at last by his own self-determination 
or purpose. This may come early or very late; it 
may be assisted by friendly wisdom, or, most sor- 
rowful of all, actual retrogression may set in like a 
blight in the wheat. How strangely the conduct of 
the pagan or the wild child resembles that of multi- 
tudes of grown people. They too have not out- 
grown their childhood. The world cries out upon 
" the unspeakable Turk." For the Turk with the 
appurtenances of civilization goes on doing the deeds 
of the barbarian. But the Turks are not the only 



60 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

wild people who commit brutalities in the modern 
man's dress! 

The Puritan mothers used to wonder how early a 
child might be " converted." How soon could his 
soul be saved? They did not know how real and 
practical the change for which they looked was. 
They looked upon it as supernatural and often made 
it seem repulsive. They did not see how joyously 
the human life takes on new powers and aptitudes. 
This is the spiritual nature. They called the law- 
less, care-free life natural; they did not recognize 
that the orderly, obedient, purposeful life is still 
more natural. The child loves to be free, but he 
loves even more to be useful. He is naturally an 
individual, but he is also social by nature. He loves 
to use his power for mischief rather than be idle; but 
he can be even more interested in using his fuller 
powers for good. 

The fact is that there is a simple and happy relig- 
ion which fits the happy, active, growing, intelli- 
gent child. It may come as early as ten or twelve 
years of age. It may not be very marked at first. 
He would not be able to define it to himself. You 
might discover, however, in some moment of inti- 
mate confidences that he has a bit of a creed some- 
what like this : I mean to do right, to tell the truth, 
to live a clean life, to be kind and accommodating, 
and to make no trouble. I want to trust the good 
Power over me and to do his will. The Boy Scouts' 
Law is not uncongenial to boys, or girls either! 



THE NATURAL BEGINNINGS OF RELIGION 6 1 

There is a child's natural religion. If his parents 
and teachers and friends are on the side of the good, 
he wants to be with them. Boys and girls dislike a 
prig, but they like any one who is simple and true- 
hearted. The little creed is the straight way of our 
average human destiny. Every one at his best likes 
it. The work of life is to keep to it. The fact is 
that we are naturally path-finders and road-makers. 
We have a journey to make. The sooner we find 
ourselves on the way, the better we like it. A pur- 
pose in life is the beginning of the way. Any in- 
telligent child can see this. To see it and do it is to 
enter upon the third period of the growth of a soul. 
A child in the grip of any honest purpose has taken 
a branch road leading toward the grand highway of 
Civilization. 

They used to think that a child, once the " subject 
of grace," was sure to remain so. But a child's 
will is inconstant. Few are born with a will to be 
right and do right. A habit of action strong enough 
to protect the boy's good intent is slow and costly 
to build: it means an accumulation of innumerable 
efforts of will. The great decision is yet to come. 
For man's life is not made merely to fit into a little 
orderly scheme of family or racial or even national 
loyalty. It is not a man's work " to be good, and 
thus to be happy," but, as Prof. George H. Palmer 
has said, to be " good for something " so large and 
spiritual as to require every original faculty, and 
never to cease to fill his mind and heart, and ever to 



62 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

present new visions. There is something in the 
heart of a man that cannot be satisfied if you give 
him all that he wants of comfort, of prosperity, of 
happiness, of success. The eager youth, outgrowing 
childhood and feeling his way to a grown man's es- 
tate, must face the question of the ages, in our age 
clearer than ever: What does life mean? What is 
the truth of it? What will you do with it? In the 
" strife 'twixt truth and falsehood," in the everlast- 
ing struggle for love's sake, which side will you 
take? Call the work of life a battle, or call it ef- 
fort, enterprise, venture, sooner or later the chal- 
lenge comes : What will you do about it? The voice 
of the best self in the man presses him onward. 
Will he choose the everlasting Yea? To say this in 
earnest, to set his will upon it, to open his mind to its 
motions, to open his heart to its wide-sweeping sym- 
pathies, is to enter the estate of his manhood. To 
fall back, to be selfish, not to dare, is " the great re- 
fusal." 

Again, as before, I am not saying that you may fix 
any point when this happy maturing process dis- 
tinctly begins. Varying experiences mark it with dif- 
ferent individuals. To some it may come like a 
" new birth " ; to others, like the high northern sun- 
rise, as a gradual and brightening dawn. The 
voices of nature call some to it. I knew a man who, 
being a hunter, saw it in the look on a little slain 
fawn's face, and he never went shooting again. 
Some find it in the story of Jesus. They vow to give 
their lives with him for the service of God. Wen- 



THE NATURAL BEGINNINGS OF RELIGION 63 

dell Phillips rose to it in the call to speak for the 
cause of the slave in Faneuil Hall. Henry George 
came to it in working out his " Progress and Pov- 
erty." Socialism has been the name of the door by 
which some have found it. A certain access of vi- 
sion is characteristic of it — a certain devotion, a 
purpose beyond any private or personal ends or am- 
bition. Any one of the great words by which men 
have sought to name the Universe Life — Beauty, 
Truth, Justice, Goodness, Love — suffices to sym- 
bolize the infinite nature of this new quest and pur- 
pose. 

There is no time in life too advanced for the vision 
or challenge to come. Refused once and again, it 
may haunt a man's soul and return to win his will. 
Not till middle age did Tolstoy catch the note of 
that new life which raised him forever above his 
times. The truth is, that we all are of the nature of 
spirit. The spirit comes and goes as the wind 
comes, as thought comes, as love comes : no one can 
predict its movements. 

But the time of all times, the time of the normal 
entrance of any life on its spiritual inheritance, is in 
youth. Youth itself is an epoch inviting change — 
the period of determination. Youth brings special 
susceptibilities to generous thought, and even to 
cheerful sacrifice. To give one's life is a natural im- 
pulse in youth. Militarism has taken advantage of 
this. The grown man's religion only asks more; 
namely, that the youth shall give his life not to die 
but to live — to live, as one willing also to die, for 



64 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

every good cause for which true men in all times 
have held their lives and fortunes in trust. Youth, 
too, is the special period of love. And religion is 
love, deepening every personal love, and adding new 
meaning to love-making, to marriage, to the home, 
to the coming of children, to the risks and ventures 
of love, to death itself. 

One of the most serious counts against the current 
religion is that no branch of the church has known 
how to make proper use of the period of youth as 
the time to induct its boys and girls into their her- 
itage as children of God. What church has seri- 
ously tried to do this? What church has ever pos- 
sessed a membership mature enough in experiences of 
spiritual manhood and womanhood, to help its youth 
to find the reality of religion? They have had to 
unlearn false religions and grope to find the good 
religion. There has never been civilization enough 
in the world, or churches fit to make ready for a 
civilized religion. 



II 

CHANGING HUMAN NATURE 

It is not enough to catch a vision of the larger life, 
or even to take an enlistment oath to follow it. 
The vision needs perpetual renewal and re-invigor- 
ation. Every fresh turn of the kaleidoscope of expe- 
rience brings new meaning and momentum. Al- 
ways, as in childhood, it takes an accumulated series 
of determined acts of the will to set the habit of the 
life. Through repeated and often costly experiences 
and ventures one finds how fine and workable the 
life is. It involves falls and lapses too, as in every 
new trade or art, where the learner gets his lessons 
and has to make new adjustments. It calls for tre- 
mendous risks, where truth and right and love seem 
to put aside success, money, place, popularity, every 
selfish desire; where it is defeat to retreat or vacil- 
late; where wonderful access of life, as if from the 
depths of being, flows in, in case we go on. 

The most perilous time of life for most men is 
not in boyhood or early youth, or on the side of the 
appetites and passions. It comes after one has " got 
his education," and attained physical growth, and 
even after he has " got his religion." The great 
danger at this point is that, when the real life should 
properly begin, the man may halt and stagnate ; he is 

65 



66 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

" grown up " now! They put " Mr.," the title of 
Master, before his name, when he is nothing at best 
but an apprentice. How many people actually grow 
better, wiser, more lovable, more useful after they 
are twenty-five years old? Is this because the sys- 
tem under which we live, the industries, the com- 
merce, the business, the social and political relations 
are all awry as regards the real enterprise of men 
set here to civilize the earth? 

No wonder the Socialists tell us that the world is 
out of joint, if men and women, the most precious 
product of the universe, have nothing to look for- 
ward to after they come to their maturity! Do we 
grow only in childhood, and then, at our maximum of 
bodily development, are we doomed to stop growing, 
to think no new thoughts, to learn no new and richer 
joys or secrets of wisdom? Is childhood meant to 
be, as some say, the only happy part of life? What 
would you think of your wheat field, if only one 
seed in a hundred ever grew up to bear fruit? This 
is to make futility of the world. It is to find no 
purpose in evolution ; it is to deny the most significant 
facts in human history. Wait till you see what re- 
ligion can do and does for the average man, not only 
for rare and gifted minds. 

Here lies the worst heresy of the popular religion; 
it is also the practical outcome of much current phil- 
osophy. The profoundest of questions touches the 
improvability of the common man. Is he worth 
while? say the skeptical men from their chairs in 
the university. Is he worth while? say the masters 



CHANGING HUMAN NATURE 67 

of business, who use men as so many tools. Does 
the church say, Yes, as a church with a gospel should 
say it? The church, content with baptizing men or 
enrolling their names, doubts their capacity to live 
and grow to their stature as men. It expects the 
least possible of them. It has no faith in the 
" Third Person " of its Trinity, to bring forth " the 
fruits of the spirit " in average men. And so it 
happens that the churches are full of people who 
seem no better at sixty and seventy than they were 
at eighteen. Yet both the future of religion and 
the fate of democracy rest upon the faith in the 
improvability of common men. Yes ! and not alone 
in a few races which just now dominate the others. 
Common men, we say, in all races. We can have 
vassal races no longer. 

But, they still say, you cannot change human 
nature. What do they mean? Human nature is 
in constant process of change. Watch your willful 
boy. Some day he catches a spark, an idea, and 
lo ! a changed man grows out of him, which no peda- 
gogue of " vocational training " could have known 
was waiting there to be evolved. Do you suppose 
that when such changes may come to any boy or 
girl before twenty-one years of age, similar gleams 
of the light of the spirit may not be looked for al- 
ways afterward? The law of their coming is that 
you look for them. Even a pet dog grows in in- 
telligence as you expect it of him, and grows little 
without such encouragement. What can you not 
do with men, when every one looks for the best in 



68 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

them, and hope stands before every man's eyes to 
the last! 

They tell us that each infant is made to pass 
through ancient phases of the life of the race. A 
child may have dim reminiscences of the wild world, 
its storms and its monsters, through which his fore- 
fathers once made their way. Each child thus fol- 
lows the line of the host that preceded him. At 
the other and ascending end of the spiral movement 
of life we find a complementary and marvelously 
prophetic process in motion. Here the new life ap- 
pears first in the individual — in the tips of the 
branches, in early fruits venturing themselves on 
sunny hill-sides in new varieties and types, bursting 
forth from the never-failing fountain of nature, in 
new faculties prompted to birth under pressure of 
unwonted conditions. Behind these pioneers and 
forerunners follow the host. After the early ber- 
ries all the fields will be full of them. 

So with the life of the spirit of man. Again and 
again individuals brought to birth — God only 
knows how — have shown the precious new life. 
The atmosphere of the old pagan world was chilly; 
the conditions of culture hardly existed. They 
were nevertheless prophetic of what shall be in due 
time. Already a warmer humanity is in the air. 
Wait ! The few shall be many. The period of 
paganism is passing away. It has become intoler- 
able. Close to the terrible war we look on at an age 
of transition. The doubting, half-pagan church 
thought that only one Christ, one Son of God, could 



CHANGING HUMAN NATURE 69 

appear. The rest of mankind, half-pagan still, 
should get into heaven, if they ever arrived, clinging 
to the hem of his garments. But the world shall yet 
see, as good " Father Taylor " once said, thousands 
of such, the thoughtful, the helpful, the lovable and 
the loving, the brave too, the forceful and fearless. 
The path of progress leads upward. The age of 
the good spirit is before us. If not now, the fields 
will yet be ripe. 



Ill 

THE PHARISEE WORLD 

I HAVE roughly sketched three great normal stages 
of man's spiritual evolution out of primitive ignor- 
ance. In the first the child, or the early man, find- 
ing his way to self-consciousness, gets his initial les- 
sons of good and evil, tries his powers, and comes up 
against the social restraints within which even the 
life of the savage man is bounded. In the second 
stage the growing child normally catches for himself 
the sense of law and order, or justice, and more or 
less willingly assents to the simple social laws which 
constitute good membership in the family, or the 
village. This is the period of learning righteousness, 
although with narrow sympathies. It is unlikely, 
however, that there was ever a time when men, being 
all alike face to face with common perils, did not 
share some dim sense of neighborliness with stran- 
gers, men in distress. In the third stage, to which, 
alas ! so far few have fairly come, the normal or 
mature man is here. His righteousness widens into 
humanity; he has caught the vision of a divine pur- 
pose, so grand as to comprehend all good for all 
men; his will, no longer constrained, even by the 
bond of duty, becomes a happy will, one with the 
great Good Will, now conceived to rule the world. 

70 



THE PHARISEE WORLD 7 1 

Upon each of these stages or periods of natural 
growth, grading into each other upwards, are super- 
imposed various phases, often more or less morbid, 
but some of them natural and necessary for the time. 
There is hardly any even and all-round growth in 
the human body or the mind, much less in society. 

Among the great phases of religious development, 
the Pharisee type or sect stands out conspicuously. 
I am aware that the name Pharisee has earned im- 
mense opprobrium. But I wish to pay my respects 
to the Pharisees. The time has come to study their 
movement, as one studies, for instance, the history 
of the Republican Party in American politics, to 
whom indeed, in their rise and their subsequent per- 
version, in their faults and their virtues, they bear a 
singular likeness. If the Pharisee faults have at 
last become odious, if the sect has done its work and 
deserves to pass away in favor of a more humane 
order, we shall not help to bring this better growth 
by abuse and denunciation. It is idle to try to 
reach and help people who cannot recognize them- 
selves in our description of them. 
IJL I am speaking of Pharisees as still here in the 
nineteenth century. They are no longer a Jewish 
sect, but a numerous and powerful body. They 
have moved over from Judaism and captured the 
great current forms of Christianity. They dom- 
inate and largely characterize Christendom. Ask 
what is the religion of the governmental people in 
the great fighting nations? It is practically Phari- 
saism. We live in a " Pharisee world." Among 



72 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

the races of mankind our own Anglo-Saxon or Teu- 
tonic stock has been specially prone to Pharisaism. 
It goes with their characteristic energy. It is ex- 
cessive in proportion to the forcefulness and adven- 
turousness of a well-fed and prosperous people. 

I speak as a son of New England Pharisees, that 
little Puritan group of emigrants to whose virtue and 
constancy, to whose conscience and saintship, in the 
case of its exceptional individuals, many a historian 
has traced the most effective moral strain in the up- 
building of our American Commonwealth. I have 
had opportunity from childhood to know the Puritan 
virtues and no less to see the subtle vices which have 
brought ridicule and even detestation upon both 
Pharisees and Puritans; for they are essentially one 
type of humanity. The sect followed a natural 
human tendency. There may always be those who 
pass up for a period through the Pharisee gateway. 

Who were the Pharisees? How do they come 
to be? They are the " law and order " men. As 
soon as human society begins, there is a differentia- 
tion of type and function. We see it in children on 
the playground; we see it in rude forms in a mining 
town. The average inhabitant is careless, ignorant, 
indifferent, " pagan "; he takes life as it comes; he is 
susceptible to either good or bad leadership; he will 
take part in a lynching, and he will rally to a prayer 
meeting, or a revival of religion; whatever he does, 
he is apt not to continue long in a single direction. 
He is readily distracted. Such is the childish state 
of mind, out of which multitudes never seem to rise. 



THE PHARISEE WORLD 73 

Have these people souls ? it is contemptuously asked. 
As the High Priest of Jerusalem says: " This people 
that know not the law" — that is, our order, our 
purpose — " shall perish." 

But out of the average and ordinary there arise 
clearer intelligences and consciences sensitive enough 
to discern the beginnings of law. It is the recog- 
nition and the use of law more than anything else 
that at first distinguish man from the dumb crea- 
tures. We modern people, accustomed to find law 
on every side of us, hardly realize how startling it 
must have been to earlier men to come upon the idea 
of law as regnant! Certain Hebrew Psalms give 
us a thrill of sympathy with those who for the first 
time, like men who had never before seen blue sky, 
voice their wonder and awe at this new thought. 
" How love I thy law: it is my meditation all the 
day." Have the words law, order, unity, purpose, 
progress grown so stale with us that we cannot see 
how tremendous they are? It is the birth of relig- 
ion when any one sees the law written everywhere 
in nature. To see this is the beginning of righteous- 
ness. To obey law, to do right, seems henceforth 
enough, simple, beautiful, necessary, effective. How 
can men live outside of this law? The man has the 
clutch, or is held in the clutch, of an ultimate mys- 
tery — one of the eternal facts of his spiritual 
nature. His new reverence is one with the awe and 
wonder with which we view the stars. Let any man 
be glad who has had the vision of righteousness ! 
Let him beware if his enthusiasm for it has cooled! 



74 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

Now the original and genuine Pharisee loved his 
law! 

When Jesus was born, the great burst of spiritual 
vision which had shown itself, perhaps first in Moses' 
time, in men who had watched the heavens from the 
deserts of Egypt, and later on the hills of Judea, in 
great prophets, in Micah and Isaiah, in Athens also 
in poets and thinkers, which had swept over distant 
India and China and produced Buddhism and Con- 
fucianism, had crystallized into a vigorous Hebrew 
sect. They were the " covenanters " of their time; 
they were the best people, the respectables, the intel- 
lectuals, not necessarily the wealthiest, but always 
and everywhere influential beyond their numbers. 
Where would you have chosen to be asked to dinner 
rather than to the chief Pharisee's house? Where 
would you have met more intelligent company or 
better mannered children? Where were women 
more respected? If you had visited in Jerusalem or 
Capernaum or Alexandria or Babylon, you would 
have liked to attend the Pharisee's simple and free 
synagogue service. Its form must have been some- 
thing like a Quaker meeting. Its special call was the 
worship of the law. Whatever else was done, some- 
one must read from the " book of the law " ; if he 
chose, he might make comments upon it. This syna- 
gogue worship which had sprung up wherever Jews 
went in the Roman Empire did not conflict at all 
with the ornate ritualism, for which people had to 
come as pilgrims to the temple in Jerusalem. You 
might only see the inside of the temple once in a life- 



THE PHARISEE WORLD 75 

time, but you must go to the synagogue every Sab- 
bath. Here was the perpetual teaching of the law; 
here children learning to read and write their let- 
ters, perhaps on the ground or floor, had the better 
part of their schooling, sometimes from the mouth 
of famous rabbis. With few books they had the 
heritage of a splendid spiritual literature. 

The Apostle Paul was the product of such a Phar- 
isee household. How many young men in a modern 
church offer better human material than his? He 
had patriotic and religious ideals for which he was 
ready to die; he was faithful and loyal, incorrupt- 
ible, brave. What manly or soldierly quality did 
he lack, as you find him traveling down to Damascus 
to arrest a group of dangerous innovators, and schis- 
matics, disturbers of the peace of his people? 
Joseph of Arimathea, Nicodemus, Jesus' timid ad- 
mirer, and the rich young man whom he loved were 
men of the Pharisee type. Was not Jesus himself 
brought up in the synagogue at Nazareth, and most 
likely in a virtuous Pharisee home? Old men and 
women can to-day recall Puritan homes, like the 
homes of Jesus' time in their seriousness, their rev- 
erential manner, their scrupulous conscience, their 
integrity of character, and their cleanness of life. 
How many Christians give as much for benevolence 
as the regular tithing system of the Pharisees re- 
quired? As for keeping the Sabbath, this is pecu- 
liarly a Pharisee, not a Christian, institution. 

What fault shall we bring against these obedient, 
excellent Pharisees, ancient or modern? Why have 



76 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

they come to be spoken against? Why do good 
Pharisees feel affronted and indignant to be called 
by that name? Why was Jesus more severe in his 
castigation of these highly respectable people than 
of any others? Did he judge them unfairly? 
Would he be equally severe towards modern Phari- 
sees? 

The faults which Jesus found in the Pharisees, 
the best church-members of their time, are exactly 
the faults which we see in the current or popular 
religion of Christendom. They are the faults of a 
spiritual movement once vital and necessary, which 
has ceased to thrive. The plant is running out. A 
people who once saw light and truth at first hand, 
no longer see for themselves; they merely repeat 
what others have seen. Good leadership has run 
out, or else become inadequate to new issues. The 
leaders look backward, not toward the sunlight; 
their attitude is timid, their temper distrustful. As 
Jesus said, they not only fail to go into the kingdom 
of heaven themselves, but they stand in the way of 
those who would enter in ! 

We measure the quality of a people or a genera- 
tion by the quality of its leadership. A people can 
hardly get on faster than their leaders, or without 
their help. But a- people now and then catch up 
with their leaders, who do not dare or wish to trust 
them or to go forward; the people have to find new 
and better leaders, who do not immediately appear. 
Then the word comes true : Woe to thee, O land, 
whose king is a child! Jesus found such a people as 



Y 



THE PHARISEE WORLD 77 

this. We see something of the same condition to- 
day. An old order has to fall back; a new order 
arises. 
£j. Let us be quite fair to the Pharisees. Excellent 
human material remains among them; the roots are 
alive. In many cases their faults are " the faults of 
their virtues." The admirable static virtues, obed- 
ience, purity, industry, alms-giving, loyalty, are still 
there. But the needs of the world are always out- 
growing its " static " virtues. It cries out for dyna- 
mic goodness, for energy, vision, enthusiasm, whole- 
hearted courage, growing sympathy, the sense of in- 
finite values in life. '/ 

A popular or respectable church gathers into its 
membership many people who do not belong there, 
or who have merely happened to be born into it. 
It presently appears, as Jesus found in the syna- 
gogues, that those inside are much the same as those 
outside. They do not hunger and thirst after right- 
eousness more than other men. In short, that hap- 
pens to a whole body, once active and useful, which 
happens to the athlete who ceases to exercise. Thus 
forever the law of the world is to thrive and climb 
and grow, or else to fall back and begin to die. 
^"The master fault of the Pharisee is his pride; he 
is proud of his pride ; he thinks pride a virtue ! Per- 
haps it is the fault of a virtue. It is the vice of the 
intelligence. It has been said that " the intellect is 
always arrogant." Pride is to the mind what tuber- 
culosis is to the organs of breathing. It is harder 
than the typhoid poison to destroy; it spoils and 



v 



78 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

degrades the brightest intellects. But the worst of 
it is that it isolates and separates a man from his 
kind, and cuts off the flow of the sympathies. When 
pride rules the will it becomes impossible to forgive. 
What wholesome relation to other men is possible 
when you place yourself above them? 

Where, if ever, in the great social epochs of his- 
tory, in the face of new moral issues, has the judg- 
ment of the educated class, the chief priests and the 
Pharisees of the time, been on the right side? I 
know of no case. The story of the anti-slavery 
movement in the United States is a signal instance 
of this*~-~It was Jesus' tragedy that the respectable 
Pharisees were his worst enemies. Their treatment 
of him was typical of the attitude of their class to 
the more progressive lovers of men at all times. 
They knew the law; they could recite the magnifi- 
cent compendium about " love to God and love to 
man," but they did not perceive that a new dispensa- 
tion was at hand, that men could never again be con- 
tent with a religious leadership which recited the 
words without doing the deeds. Jesus' straight-for- 
wardness undermined the delusion of their supposed 
superiority and hurt their pride, and presently they 
and the Sadducees worked the usual and fatal com- 
bination of Church and State to destroy him. - : 

Pharisaism grows out of a sort of sensitive self- 
consciousness. You wonder at times with the Hindu 
philosophers whether self-consciousness is not a 
curse? What beautiful things, like flowers and but- 



THE PHARISEE WORLD 79 

terflies and the smiles of a child, nature produces 
without any self-consciousness ! Are not man's own 
best works and noblest actions free from it? Could 
not Nature produce man without giving him this 
strange double-faced gift? Doubtless not. It is 
one with the conscience that knows good and evil. 
Its sensitiveness is that by which man recognizes 
values and therefore sees ideals. It is the price man 
pays before he may attain his freedom, and enter 
into the purpose of God. He must be an apprentice 
to Nature, climbing through a region of half-lights, 
between ignorance and knowledge. The word 
Pharisee marks this period of apprenticeship in the 
course of a life. 

Like all good gifts, self-consciousness brings pleas- 
ure and pain, privilege and perils. While on the 
way to create a person, it magnifies the Ego. It 
swells his conceit of his intellect, his knowledge, his 
skill, his virtue. He sets himself, his family, his 
caste, his nation at the center of the world. If he 
dare not say, " I am the Master of my fate," he 
easily believes it. But when things go wrong, he 
is apt to cry, " Behold: there is no sorrow like my 
sorrow! " 

Self-consciousness, like pride, cuts off sympathy or 
the circulation of the social life. The self-centered 
soul does not like to acknowledge the fact of its 
dependence. Where egotism grows, where conceit, 
pride, arrogance, are, there sympathy fails. Let 
any one watch his egotistic moods and see what hap- 
pens. The imagination, the judgment, the con- 



80 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

science, and the will are dulled. The man begins to 
be weak where he thought himself strong. These 
are the times of our spiritual danger. They belong 
to the Pharisee period. They ought to give us pain 
and shame. We might well pray: From apprentice- 
ship with the Pharisees, good Lord, deliver us ! 

What hurt Jesus' feelings more than anything else, 
as he rubbed against the Pharisee class, was their 
treatment of others. They despised others; they 
were spiritual aristocrats. They had room in their 
world for people to whom to give alms, but they did 
not like common people, the proletariat of their 
time. The story of the two men who went up into 
the temple to pray is typical. Here is what spiritual 
contempt does. Contempt for any fellow man is 
inhuman; it blights the soul which admits it. Who 
deems himself so far superior to any other man as 
to refuse to speak to him? 

The Pharisees knew all about fasting and saying 
prayers; they could have said any day, " Have mercy 
upon us, miserable sinners," if these words had been 
in their prayer book. But they did not know what 
humility is, much less humiliation : they never 
thought to ask what particular sins they were con- 
fessing; for this would have meant healthy shame 
and the will to be better. It never occurred to the 
pious Pharisee that his thought, " Thank God that 
I am not as other men — like this wretched Publi- 
can," was the symptom of spiritual anaemia. In 
what harsh words to little children, in what cruel 
abuse of power and privilege, in what fearful perse- 



THE PHARISEE WORLD 8 1 

cution of humble people, in what wars against here- 
tics and infidels, in what preposterous quarrels 
among the good and respectable themselves, this un- 
sympathetic Pharisee pride and contempt have re- 
sulted. 

Pharisaism takes its victims unawares. A keen- 
minded minister in one of the oldest city churches 
in New England described his church people as 
" wanting sympathy " — the very quality which they 
probably supposed they possessed above others ! In 
his subtle inability to see himself as others see him, 
the Pharisee finds a mission of meddlesomeness. If 
he is an Anglo-Saxon, he can scarcely keep his hand 
off other people's affairs. He desires to overthrow 
their idols and level their altars and make them 
" altogether as himself." Grant that the material 
of a virtue is here at work. It may be genuine zeal 
to make converts to a better faith, to clean up a 
wicked world, and garner a fresh harvest of right- 
eousness. How much real sympathy underlies this 
missionary zeal? How much respect? Suppose 
contempt, bigotry, especially the will to compel and 
control others, and punish their wickedness, enter 
into this delicate missionary enterprise ! Paul on 
his march to Damascus illustrates my meaning. The 
Pharisee never sees that the reservoirs of life are 
shut off as soon as we try to force our morals, our 
Christianity, our democracy upon the unwilling or 
unready. 

Perhaps there is the germ of a Pharisee in every- 
one. A crowd will go with you to compel men to 



82 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

,/, ■■' 

behave. Men of impure life will help to punish 
other men for their sins. A nation that upholds war 
will denounce its neighbor's atrocities. Is it not 
Pharisaism which sends missions to the heathen with- 
out respecting them, and at the same time assumes 
at home to judge, condemn, jail, and kill our own 
heathen without any sympathy? Contrast with this 
the story of Jesus to whom was brought the woman 
taken in adultery ! 

The tale of " The Prodigal Son," better called 
" The Two Brothers," illuminates the Pharisee char- 
acter. The point of the parable lies in the conduct 
of the elder son. He is a Pharisee; he has always 
obeyed; every one has praised him. Who would not 
choose to live on the same street or do business with 
him? Does not Jesus indeed let off the worthless 
prodigal rather too easily? What? No punish- 
ment? No probation? How do you know that he 
has repented? To be received as if he had merely 
returned from a journey! Where do the long years 
of righteous life come in alongside of this free and 
easy forgiveness? So the Pharisee in us asks. The 
Pharisee, Jewish or Christian, does not know what 
forgiveness is. And yet the word forgive is the un- 
ceasing refrain of the New Testament. Jesus' grav- 
est count against the Pharisees is that they have no 
gospel of " the forgiveness of sins." The young 
Pharisee in the story has admirable traits. But 
Jesus discovers in him the same essential selfishness 
which drove the younger brother into the fields to 
feed swine ! What is there brotherly in him, as he 



THE PHARISEE WORLD 83 

stands outside his father's house refusing to enter, 
complaining, spoiling his father's joy, unforgiving, 
preferring that his brother should have stayed and 
died feeding swine ! This is what Pharisaism does 
with its haughty self-righteousness. There is no 
punishment so dreadful as to be cut off from the 
flow of the social life; it is to be cut off from the life 
of God. 

I doubt not there are gleams of autobiography in 
the Thirteenth Chapter of I. Corinthians. Paul was 
the man willing to " give his goods to feed the 
poor " ; he was the man who would have given " his 
body to be burned." The fanatic can always do it. 
His unrelenting virtue, his enthusiasm for his law 
and his race, his partisan zeal for national order 
and unity made him perhaps the most dangerous 
man in Jerusalem. The wicked men, the loose 
livers and vicious, have not been implacably merci- 
less, have not maintained Inquisitions, or justified 
inhumane modes of punishment, or pushed wars to 
" the bitter end." But the unforgiving and obstin- 
ate virtuous have stood behind the most cruel acts 
of history. Who to-day block social reforms? 
Who are most stubborn against them? The Phari- 
sees. Who are so afraid of new doctrines, new 
science, new political ideas? The Pharisees. 

Paul might have become an ascetic; he might have 
thrown himself away in a zealot rebellion ; he might 
have settled down into the narrow habits of a respec- 
table rabbi in Tarsus, and we should have never 



84 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

heard of him. What happened to Paul to make him 
a new man? If you cannot change human nature 
you can set the graft of a new idea in it. You can 
keep whatever was good in the wild olive tree, and 
have a new species of fruit. There came to Paul 
the inflow of love or good will. It is this which 
he describes in a letter to the Corinthians in the most 
eloquent passage that he ever wrote. No Pharisee 
had this. He describes it again when he says, " The 
fruits of the spirit are love, joy, peace," and every- 
thing else which completes a full human life at its 
best. He is all that he was — a and b and c, plus x 
and n. The sources and supply of the new life ex- 
ceed measurement. No one who has caught the 
vision of this larger life and begins to long for it, can 
ever again be a Pharisee ! 

A word, finally, as regards the Pharisee exclusive- 
ness. It was the price which he had to pay for the 
kind of service he rendered. The beginnings of 
goodness in law and order almost required a sort of 
exclusiveness. Imagine a little group of puritan 
people in the face of the idolatry of Babylon or 
Jerusalem! What could they do to secure the per- 
petuation of their faith? How could they let their 
children mix freely with " all sorts and conditions 
of men " in the street, the market place, the vile 
amusements? What could the early Christians do 
in Rome unless they made themselves for the time a 
peculiar people? The settlement of New England 
took place because puritan families could not live 
and thrive and keep their strict cult in the tolerant 



THE PHARISEE WORLD 85 

cities of Holland. In a world emerging from pagan- 
ism, must not the lovers of righteousness stand close 
together for mutual support? 

Presently, however, the social laws of the world 
undermine every policy of particularism or special 
protection of infant enterprises, however necessary 
it may at first appear. Do you wish to enjoy emi- 
nence of any sort? The law is then, that you must 
level up towards it all around you and share it, and 
make it accessible ; else the rains and tides will wash 
it away. 

This is to say that the world does not now need 
its old Pharisee barriers and restraints, or the at- 
tempted Pharisee patent right of spiritual privilege. 
The peoples of the world are moving together ; they 
want for all the advantages of the few — the best 
spiritual education for all. We cannot run away 
from people and colonize by ourselves. If, then, 
we have privilege we must labor the harder to share 
it. Meantime new facilities of intercourse bring all 
races with their customs and religions to our doors. 
It is a sort of universal " community of goods." 
We can keep our religion only by putting it to use. 
The peril of losing it does not come to-day from 
trusting and using it, but rather from the failure to 
believe in it. It will move us to establish societies 
and brotherhoods of like-minded people in every 
land; we propose to fit men to be citizens of the 
world. 



IV 



THE SUPERMAN, OR MAN AT HIS BEST 

We have heard a good deal, especially by the way 
of Germany, of a new possibility in evolution — the 
Superman. This superman will be as much above 
ordinary mortals as they overtop lower orders of 
creatures. The fact is, every one is dissatisfied with 
such men as we mostly have now. What mean- 
nesses, what stupidities, what cowardice, what cru- 
elty, what lack of decision, manly power, and will! 
What a frightful mess the ablest, picked men make 
of all human affairs, of business, industry, govern- 
ment! How the fairly reputed among them disap- 
point us and go wrong! How often priests and 
ministers give religion the most grievous interpreta- 
tion and manage to make it odious! How wild 
whole nations will go in the fever of war time ! 
All the early beasts, tooth and claw, are behind the 
well-dressed people in a drawing-room, a Congress, 
or church. The Superman is due to arrive ! We 
need him. Is there any sign, however, of his com- 
ing? Is he likely, if he comes, to be the kind of 
superior man that we want? We confess to some 
fear of him. He will have plenty of power, of 
intelligence, of will. Is he going to be as good as 

men even now are, at their best? Will he be socially 

86 



THE SUPERMAN 87 

minded and lovable? Suppose he turns out to be 
hard, proud, and selfish? 

Why should we look so hopelessly so far afield to 
expect a superman? Who knows that we cannot do 
better with this common human nature which lies 
in us and all about us? Mean as nearly all men 
can be at their lowest, what does any one want better 
than man can be at his best? I want to show by 
demonstration of facts that we have in this human 
nature the making of better supermen than any biol- 
ogist has dreamed of. In fact, this kind of supe- 
rior man comes in the natural line of evolution. 
There is, first, the natural or physical man; then 
normally, as you would expect in consonance with 
the facts of the spiritual realm, the essentially spirit- 
ual man ; that is, the man of the good spirit. This is 
the order of men for whom the whole weary crea- 
tion is looking, in true evolutionary succession, as 
" the manifestation of the sons of God." Man does 
not greatly want any further development in stature, 
in muscle, or even in brain power. He does not 
half use what brains he has. But he wants immense 
development in the life of the spirit. I mean the 
spirit, not of a superman, but of a plain man. 

There is a classic piece of noble literature that 
men never tire of citing. More than two thousand 
years old, it shines no less brilliantly through its 
antiquity: " What does the Lord require of thee 
but to do justly, to love mercy and to walk humbly 
with thy God? " Readers and even students mostly 



88 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

skim over it and hardly begin to understand it. 
They are apt to be more interested in searching out 
the evidences for or against baptism by immersion, 
or the supposed prophecies about " the Scarlet 
Woman," or in forcing Jesus' royal genealogy in 
Luke into agreement with the list of names in Mat- 
thew ! And so the greater matters of justice, mercy, 
and truth are passed by. We need not be sure that 
the lonely, unknown prophet of Israel could fully 
understand how great a saying he uttered. The 
time had not come to fill the world with its publish- 
ment. I wish to show how these words point the 
way of spiritual evolution. Here is the answer to 
the question: What does the Lord of Life want to 
make of a man — that is, what satisfies God? If 
any one is still shy of using the word God, put the 
same idea in any other way. What do we want 
more than anything else of one another and of 
our children? What do we want when we see our 
own needs? Or, again, what kind of a superman 
would best fit into the companionship of intelligent 
beings anywhere in the universe ? 

Our prescription, or law, for making a man is 
simple enough for a child. It has only three points 
— first, to do justice; secondly, to love mercy; 
thirdly, to walk humbly with God. Let us translate 
this last, to be modest. Here is a genuine Trinity: 
justice, friendliness, modesty are one! Each is in 
the other and each holds its own place. 

See now, a step at a time, what this threefold idea, 
once entering any man's soul, does to him. Perhaps 



THE SUPERMAN 89 

you think it too easy. Consider justice ! It seems 
immediately to lie on the surface of our minds. Jus- 
tice! men say; we desire it more than anything. 
Children think so; struggling workmen will starve 
for it; the proud masters of men will spend their 
" last dollar " rather than suffer injustice. Great 
nations will sacrifice their boys' lives by the millions 
to compel justice upon the world. But this is not 
what the great word says. In fact, it runs the oppo- 
site way. These people all want to get justice, to 
force others to do justice, in fact to compel their own 
will, whether just or not, upon others who struggle 
also for their partisan, or national, idea of justice. 

The word is to do justice; this plain emphasis is 
commonly overlooked. It is the same idea that 
you find in the beatitude : " Blessed [that is, happy] 
are they who hunger and thirst after righteousness." 
No one pretends that the people who hunger and 
thirst to get righteousness out of other men are 
happy; they are anxious, nervous, fearful, lest they 
fail to get justice. But Jesus and others had ob- 
served that those who give their attention to do 
justice are happy. It is not said they will be happy 
in some other life, or " in heaven." They carry 
heaven in their hearts now. Let any man set his 
mind to do justice, and he never lies awake nights 
because others fail to do justice to him. 

The startling paradox is, that here is the way to 
success in every kind of enterprise. Does the pupil 
want good marks at school? He will not get them 
by asking for them ; this is not his affair : he will get 



90 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

them by setting his mind on his lessons, in which 
case it is not important to have marks at all. Does 
the lad want an increase of wages? Does he com- 
plain that he is not treated fairly? Let him put his 
will into his work and make himself useful. There 
are not enough workmen of this sort in any indus- 
try; no employer can afford to refuse to do such 
workmen justice. 

Does the wife desire praise, appreciation, and 
love? What domestic tragedies arise when a 
woman seeks to get or claim her dues! The atti- 
tude of the beggar or claimant for love shuts the 
heart. Let her do her best as wife and mother, 
and never mind how much or little she is loved. 
Love will now surround her. 

All nations have gone to war for their rights. 
No nation has ever tried the one experiment, to do 
justice to others. A few years ago the United 
States merely declined to take money from China 
which did not belong to her. The act astonished 
the world and made millions of Chinese our friends. 
If the United States had always taken pains to do 
justice in Europe, to South American Republics, to 
the peoples in the Orient, to her Indian tribes, to her 
own poor and her immigrants, she would never have 
had to fear any belligerent nation. So impregnable 
an armament is the will to do justice ! 

The way to get justice is to do justice, whether 
the other party does it or not. We do not affirm 
this for some other world or for future ages, but in 
this imperfect world now. Every one approves of 



THE SUPERMAN 9 1 

those who do justice, admires them, likes to do busi- 
ness with them, to live with them as neighbors. 

Let me not be misunderstood; I advise no one to 
be ignorant of his rights, to throw his rights away, 
to make believe that it is pleasant to bear with in- 
justice. I am not saying that it never becomes a 
social or national duty to seek justice. The fact is 
that no one ever can suffer alone. To suffer a 
wrong and never frankly to say that you suffer may 
do a wrong to others. The offending party may not 
be aware of what he is doing. He may need to 
understand your point of view. A government, 
however intent on doing justice, must respect other 
people enough to believe that they too wish to do 
justice, and therefore desire to know wherein their 
conduct seems unfair. 

The broad rule, however, holds good. The way 
to get justice is, first, to do it. Here is the empha- 
sis, not where men and nations have hitherto placed 
it. If you want to get justice more than to do it, 
you do not know what justice is, least of all, what 
it is to " hunger and thirst " for it. Do you love 
to give good measure? If not, some day you will 
be caught giving false weight. Moreover, our atti- 
tude, when we seek our rights, will make all the dif- 
ference in our success. Do we threaten and com- 
plain, as if we expected the other to refuse us? We 
can make it impossible for the other to meet us half 
way; whereas, each man at his best, brings the other 
man to his best. How soon wars would cease if one 
nation was great enough to do justly to all others ! 



92 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

Our second point in describing the life of a man 
" at his best " is that he loves mercy. Plenty of 
people are kind when they feel like it. We gen- 
erally love to do kind things — when we think of it. 
The priest and the Levite on the Jericho road would 
have given alms to a beggar. If there had been a 
Red Cross Society, all the Pharisees in Jerusalem 
would have put down a subscription. What was the 
difference between these men and the unknown 
Samaritan? The Samaritan loved to be kind; he set 
his heart on helping people; where the need was, he 
saw a brother. The greater the need, the more he 
loved to meet it. There are those who like cattle, 
horses, dogs, birds. This man loves people. He 
was ready to love the particular person who needed 
him most. We have read about the St. Bernard 
dogs at an Alpine convent; their business is to watch 
out for lost travelers. Why should there not be 
men as good as these dogs? 

The St. Bernard dog is a kind of professional 
philanthropist. Rescue work in the snow is his only 
business. The beauty of Jesus' friend, however, is 
that he is no professional at all. Jesus only says 
V a Samaritan," as one might say an American, a 
Chinese, or a German. He is not on his way to visit 
a hospital in Jericho. He might be a farmer or 
a small trader, unafraid of the robbers, forehanded, 
well supplied with credit at the inn. What he did 
was an incident. So much the better! It suggests 
a thousand ordinary ways in which a man makes 



THE SUPERMAN 93 

light shine, as a lamp does, as a matter of course. 
Observe how thorough he is in his work at the inn, 
as becomes a man of sound habits. He does not 
leave the innkeeper in charge of a penniless boarder. 
He pays in advance on the man's lodging and gives 
him credit if he needs to stay longer. And then he 
disappears altogether. You wonder if he ever told 
his wife of the incident? As Marcus Aurelius says : 
" As a horse when he has run, a dog when he has 
tracked the game, a bee when it has made the honey, 
so a man when he has done a good act, does not 
wait to be thanked, but goes on to do another good 
act, as the vine produces grapes in its season." 

Such is a normal, friendly man who " loves 
mercy." Who asks for supermen, when the common 
man of a mongrel race does the things for which the 
world needs supermen? We conceive of the super- 
man as able to fit his place wherever he is set, but 
any common man, at his best, who loves mercy, fits 
his place anywhere in any country or world. Who 
shall say that the story was not of a man whom 
Jesus had seen? 

There are Christians, captivated by the methods 
of fighting men, who suggest that the man in the 
story might have been better employed in organizing 
a vigilance committee to u clean up " the bandits. 
This is where organized government, with Roman 
legions behind it, had failed. In fact, the cruel gov- 
ernmental violence had most likely created the ban- 
dits. We say, Put men who love justice into the 



94 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

government: put them in charge of every unfortu- 
nate class. Ugly criminals, wild Indians, savage 
Moros have thus been tamed into men. 

The third point in the way of making a man at 
his best is modesty. We give the least possible 
value to the pious conventional postures whereby 
men " humble themselves before God." Humble 
words may be tangled up with the worst forms of 
spiritual pride, with pride of birth and station and 
race. Give us simple unadorned modesty, the nor- 
mal outlook on life of all simple-hearted people. 
This is what is meant by that ancient Hebrew re- 
frain, " Blessed are the meek." Since the word 
meek has been spoiled, let us say the modest. They 
are the gentle or kindly; they put on no airs; they 
never take themselves too seriously; they are apt to 
have a saving sense of humor, rather needful in the 
human equipment. 

It is marvelous how in " The Beatitudes " the 
usual values of the world are reversed. Men have 
thought: Blessed are the proud — the warriors, the 
kings and lords, the millionaires. Are they the 
happy ones? They often live in fear; they are 
anxious about their money and position. They do 
not know how to get on with other people ; they ex- 
pect to make their way by buying or commandeering 
other men's services — an inhuman way to get 
service. The wise long ago observed that the 
proud, with all sorts of things to enjoy, were for- 
ever coming to grief; that pride goes to a fall. And 



THE SUPERMAN 95 

the wise remarked, as we may remark if we watch. 
Happy and thrice happy are the modest! 

Here is the sense in our story of Antaeus. Up 
in the air, his strength went out of him. But when 
he fell back to the earth, he was strong. The fall 
had done him no harm; his own earth did him 
good. 

Modesty is no mere accident; it is no pale nega- 
tion. It takes the intelligence, not of a Teutonic 
superman, but of a man of common sense. It is 
based in the truth of things, as for example, that we 
men at the best are only men, limited in power, in 
wit, in wisdom, in experience — men too in the face 
of an infinite world to be learned and won; to which 
we have to adjust ourselves or else to be wretched 
— most of us small men also in comparison with the 
great minds and geniuses of our race. Moreover, 
everything is lent or given us by the unseen creative, 
guiding Power. Let a man be strong beyond the 
average; let a woman be beautiful; suppose a rare 
genius in art or music or poetry. How did this ex- 
cellence come ? We speak accurately in saying that 
such persons are u gifted." No one created his 
rare power or faculty. Some one insists : " I 
worked hard to attain it; I spent years in training." 
But where did the will and the vision come from that 
other men lacked? What is the will itself, but the 
mightiest of " the gifts of the gods " ? It is the 
common lot of man, and his glory also, that he never 
attains to his own full stature and power, the ideal 
and design in the thought of the Master of Life. 



9& A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

The great sons of God have learned to be meek, as 
the little and truthful ones may well be. 

The words of the prayer, " Thy will be done," are 
the supreme mark of a man's intelligence. How 
dreadful that they should become a parrot perform- 
ance! It takes will and a vision of truth to say 
them. They ask no favor; they express intelligent, 
forceful, modest purpose. What proud man ever 
does, or can, say: " God's will be done " ! But he 
says instead: " My will be done." This is the will 
to power, to wealth, to victory, to overcome rivals, 
to have and to hold. In the end, this is the will 
to disaster for himself, for his children, for his 
nation. But " God's will be done," means — I will 
whatever is best, I desire nothing else so much, I 
^ trust all to the Eternal. 

This was the greatness of Abraham Lincoln. 
Various and contrary-minded people, despising his 
common mind, tried to persuade him that their will 
ought to be his will. His intelligence was less elab- 
orately furnished than theirs. But he saw what 
sophisticated men could not understand, that the clue 
to all tangled human affairs is to seek, as if one were 
only a child, to find the mind or good will of God, 
and follow it as a man would follow a trail through 
the woods, ^y 

We now see the meaning of Jesus' notable answer 
to the question: Who will be greatest in the king- 
dom of heaven? The answer goes down to bed 
rock and reverses all ordinary childish opinion. He 
who is the greatest servant of all will be greatest. 



THE SUPERMAN 97 

He will be great by not trying to be great. The 
farmer will be great, not by making more money 
than other farmers, but by his excellent product, 
by the improvement of his farm, by his manly in- 
tegrity. The physician will be great, not by his in- 
come, but by his ministrations to his patients, by 
the value of his medical discoveries, by his public- 
spirited services. The office-holder will be great, 
not by his skill in getting votes, but by his respect for 
all kinds and conditions of men, by his generous and 
obliging uprightness. You can never know who is 
the greatest of all. There is always room higher 
up in the scale. There are always new ways to 
serve men. You will look in the wrong place to 
discover the great. It may be that the humblest 
woman proves to be the one who saves the city. 

Have we not now made out our proposition? It 
seems impregnable. Our superman is simply the 
common man, at his best, not imitating some other 
man, or forcing himself to be what he is not; his own 
best self is enough. He is here to do and give 
justice ; this will make justice prevail. This gives a 
man integrity and independence. He is here to do 
kindness, and this gives him respect, simplicity, affec- 
tion. He cannot help being modest, and modesty 
goes with power, increases power, sharpens the 
mind, and gives poise, ease and dignity. Whoever 
is modest goes a long way to be lovable. But no 
matter for that. To be modest is to seek to give 
love, not to get it. All this calls for will which is 
life; not self-will, but good will. To say " Thy will 



98 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

be done " is to say: Let the Good Will be done. It 
is to desire the best, to look for the best, to do the 
best. 

Try finally, any one of the strands of our three- 
fold cable of life, and you will find it inextricably in- 
volved with the others. Try to do justice, search 
out the meaning of justice, find out how great a thing 
it is to do at all times to all men, and you become no 
less scrupulous, but more merciful every day in your 
judgments and your demands. You cease now ever 
to wish to punish any one. The effort to do justice 
repeatedly teaches modesty also. So does the en- 
deavor to show mercy, and especially so as to leave 
permanent good. The only real helpfulness is that 
which sets men in the way to be, if possible, better 
than you are. You must give them respect; you 
must give them sympathy; you must share your 
vision and purpose; you must do your business with 
good will. Try this and be modest accordingly. 



V 

THE SUMMUM BONUM 

In our satisfactions there are obviously all kinds 
of degrees and qualities. What are the things that, 
if you seek righteousness first, " shall be added unto 
you"? The old inquiry: What is the summum 
bonum, the highest good, the chief end of man, has 
its difficulties in the wonderful variety of human 
desires. The healthy zest of the hungry man to 
eat and drink, overrunning its mark, becomes a mat- 
ter of shame. Does a man read his Bible, or go to 
church, or hear a learned lecture, with such a hun- 
gry appetite as this? Ought he not to fast on occa- 
sion, so as to rebuke this eager animal desire? 
Probably not. He will curb his appetite sufficiently, 
provided only he will forbid it to stand in the way 
of the enterprise of his life. Does any appetite 
render him less effective as workman or father or 
friend? Does it take off the fine edge of his skill, 
his intelligence, his social sympathy? Here lies the 
secret of a man's self-mastery. The animal in him 
is not to be crucified like an evil demon. Let it be 
put to the service of the guiding mind, of the sympa- 
thies, of a great and worthy purpose. His zest or 
keenness of sense on his physical side is a gift of 

99 



100 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

God, the normal attendant of a well and active 
body. To fast and go without is indolence, com- 
pared with intelligent and well controlled temper- 
ance. 

We must presently, however, draw a line, real if 
invisible, between the good things which the body 
wants, and a class of satisfactions which are wholly 
spiritual. There is no comparison between them. 
No man needs to ask: What do I love best, my din- 
ner or my child, my vacation in the woods or my re- 
ligion? The word love does not apply in the one 
case as it does in the other. The physical desire 
presently is satisfied, and then palls; or wears out 
altogether, and the man is unhurt. The other 
kind grows upward with a sort of infinite reach. 
If the desires and satisfactions of friendship and 
love, his ideals and aspirations, could pall or die, the 
man would cease to be human; some fatal disease 
would have befallen him. 

Note here again, the working of the principle that 
we have followed before. Life consists in expres- 
sion and grows by expression. The great spiritual 
values and satisfactions continually demand to be ex- 
pressed — in words, in deeds, in subtle and unseen 
forms of outflow. Love is not normal that is not 
told. Aspiration is feeble as long as it stays in 
dreamland. Let it out into effort. You do in- 
justice to your religion if you hold it in silence; it 
wants to be communicated. Here is the kernel of 
truth in the rule, always to smile upon people ! 

The greatest of gifts is the fulfillment of life — ■ 



THE SUMMUM BONUM IOI 

that the cup of life, or better, the channels of life 
shall be full, and grow deeper. Let the bodily life 
go forth in every healthful mode of expression; let 
the intelligence utter itself in fitting language, in 
skill, art, music, in useful acts; let the great human 
emotions also go forth warm and fresh in every 
mode of brotherly affection, in the ways of humane 
respect and brotherly service; let admiration, rever- 
ence, and the sense of an infinite companionship, go 
abroad in their own characteristic forms of expres- 
sion — this is the fulfillment of life. There seems 
to be no limit to it. What can any superman have 
or do more? No man surely has yet exhausted the 
possibilities of life as they stretch out into every 
field of the spiritual universe. 

I have spoken of the motion of life after the figure 
of a flow or current. To live best is to flow most 
freely. In a sense the life of the man is like the 
life of a tree. Look at the tree in the spring: it is 
surcharged with the generous flow of its sap; every 
drop of it is running up and outward on its single 
business — to fulfill itself, to express, not the life of 
some other tree, but its own, the peach or the maple, 
or whatever kind of tree it may be. So with the 
life of each child of the spiritual universe. No one 
has to imitate the enterprise of another, not even of 
a Christ; he has only to bring his own true self to 
fulfillment, and forever to grow and express more of 
it. What is this best self unless, as in the Christ 
story, it is another expression of the heart and mind 
of God? It is fullness of life. 



102 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

The life of the tree, like all normal life, goes out 
and upward; its business is with expression. But 
how shall it have income enough to grow ? Answer 
this by the parable of the breath. Hold your 
breath if you can ! Let your breath out and the air 
rushes in. Timid, suspicious, distrustful people do 
not know this. Use the muscle, and it grows big- 
ger; use the sense and it grows keen; use your art, 
paint pictures; give devotion and sympathy; in short, 
invest your capital, and you never need worry as to 
where income will come from. Innumerable un- 
seen rootlets under the soil are at work feeding the 
plant that grows; millions of tiny cells passing life 
on into new potencies, are being unconsciously multi- 
plied, as they pour every drop possible onwards to 
help the tree burst into blossom and go on to ripen 
its fruit. " Seek and ye shall find " means a per- 
petual promise. Utter your questions, search the 
heart of nature, turn your desires into streams of 
social activity, and you shall never be disappointed. 

What subtle element is it in the life of a plant, 
above all its other modes of expression, that keeps 
it what it is and never lets it be anything else? You 
never know the tree till you have tasted its fruit. 
The fruit is its seed, mysteriously bearing it on with 
its peculiar aroma, like an immortal principle to 
make life like its own prevail on the earth. There is 
that also in man which characterizes him at his best; 
constitutes him human; flowing in him fulfills his life 
and possesses him with power, drawn from the in- 
finite sources. It is his good will. When the man 



THE SUMMUM BONUM 103 

expresses good will the best self is there present. 
The good will uses every faculty in us; it calls the 
best from every muscle and nerve ; it uses the man's 
whole intelligence; there is no normal channel of 
expression of thought or emotion through which a 
good will does not seek to shine forth in utterance. 
If one name were ever enough to describe a real 
man, it would be the Good Will incarnate. If one 
word might describe our highest possible thought of 
the universe life, it would be the Infinite Good Will. 
Why do we say Good Will, and not rather love ? 
Because good will is more than love and includes 
love; because love has been abused by cheap senti- 
mentalism; because love is a special word to express 
intimacy; whereas, good will is the universal, ever- 
present and urging life, the condition of the fulfill- 
ment of life at its best. More than anything else it 
makes man human. The genuine man always ex-. 
presses a good will. His good will is ready to move 
in every direction as light flows ; it never changes into 
ill will or selfish indifference. You can turn on your 
will like the electric power, by a motion, at a call 
of need, at the pressure of an emergency. Whereas, 
love, a feeling or sentiment, cannot be comman- 
deered. Can you love " to order " ? Can you love 
people whom you have not seen? Can you love 
people merely because they dwell within the boun- 
daries of the United States? Can you love people 
in Africa? Can you love when men approach you 
with threats? Even the doctor and nurse must have 
a chance for acquaintance before their affection 



104 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

flows. But you can use your will to call up your 
pity or your humane regard or to meet a peril. 
Your will can bring to your face a friendly aspect 
to overcome the threatening looks of another. The 
kindly Samaritan did not need love to begin his serv- 
ice; all he needed was to release his friendly will; 
affection would come in due time with better ac- 
quaintance. There is danger of hypocrisy if we 
talk too glibly about love, or strain after it. 

Moreover, will, fairly understood, is the center of 
life, the kernel of the self. What other force is so 
real and so spiritual? Nothing else but a good will 
commands the whole being into its service. The 
only use of the will is to express good; that is, 
friendly, social, useful life. Can you imagine an 
infinite evil will ? Thus the grand law, however we 
turn, writes itself: Be your best self; be a good will; 
express the good will always to all beings; never 
cease to let the good will flow in some appropriate 
form of beneficence. This is life at its full. Call it 
the universe life, or life eternal, and you will not 
call it by too high a name. Never doubt that you, 
being the child of the universe, share this mode of 
life. Trust that such life is in other men also, who 
would not be human if they did not possess it. Ex- 
pect it in them, call it forth by your own hearty ut- 
terance; be patient if need be, with the child, with 
the ignorant, with the wrong doer; for there sleeps 
in each the spirit that makes men. 

Finally, this is as verifiable as the law of gravita- 
tion, Do you doubt gravitation? Throw a ball 



THE SUMMUM BONUM 105 

into the air or jump from the steps. Gravitation 
possesses you. Look for it everywhere and you will 
see it at work. No man could " become a Chris- 
tian " — whatever this means — if this were not so. 
Who has never caught the gleam of its light in a 
little child's face or its tones in his voice? Recall 
the most royal moments, hours, days, in your life, 
and discover what made them? These were never 
the times of pushing self-indulgence, of vulgar com- 
petition to seem greater than others, of eager effort 
to get what you had not earned, or of angry strug- 
gle : they were the times, however brief, when your 
good will uttered itself. Friendship is one of its 
names; devotion is a name of it; love is its name. 
Have you never had friends? Have you never en- 
joyed an unselfish love for your mother or any one 
else? Have you never given an hour to stand by 
some one in distress? To tell your sympathy to 
some one in trouble? To pay a call on a sick neigh- 
bor? All was well with you then. You were mak- 
ing an experiment in good will. This was religion 
at work. Why do not men continually verify their 
religion? Why do they not link moment to mo- 
ment, as men draw dots into lines and lines into cir- 
cles and forms, and so, instead of disconnected, pur- 
poseless fragments of life, build their whole lives 
into unity, like so many beautiful works of art? 
There are such lives; we have seen the manifesta- 
tion of " the sons of God " again and again. The 
good will, the true self within us, waits ready to 
order all our lives likewise. 



VI 

TWO LEVELS OF LIFE: THE GREAT ADVENTURE 

I WISH in no way to blunt the fact of the moral dif- 
ferences in men. There are profound and startling 
differences — of just and unjust, kind and cruel, 
gentle and arbitrary, clean and devilish. But these 
differences do not lie as people commonly place 
them. It pleases us somehow to draw sharp lines 
with heavy shading between one man and his neigh- 
bors: one is good, the other is bad; one is moral, 
the other immoral. We like to draw such sharp 
lines between whole groups of men; between parties 
— our party and the opposite or worse party; be- 
tween nations — our own and rival or enemy na- 
tions; between races — our own gifted and forward- 
looking race over against the darker and backward 
races. We exaggerate the virtues on our side of 
the line and the vices on the other side. You may 
call this the vertical method of distinction. No 
quarrel or war could be carried on without the use 
of this method. 

Moreover, you can always make this kind of dif- 
ference look plausible, and always in your own 
favor. But the other man can do the same thing 
from his point of view. You naturally leave out 
the seamy side of your family, your party, your na- 

106 



TWO LEVELS OF LIFE 1 07 

tion, your sect, your own personal character, and 
you assume all the bright colors that you like to paint 
with. The other does the same in favor of the Eng- 
lish, or Japanese, or Teutonic side. Attend a Fore- 
fathers' Day Celebration. You would think that 
your ancestors were of one mold, that all had the 
same heroism, devotion, piety, faithfulness. You 
would think that the inheritors of their names pos- 
sess their virtues to-day! Was there ever a Golden 
Age in the colonies of Plymouth and Massachusetts 
Bay? 

The real and deep differences among men are 
drawn the other way; they are horizontal. They 
are through each man's soul; they go like the strata 
in the hills through sects, religions, parties, nations 
and races. If a stratum is worthless in Asia and 
Africa, the same stratum is worthless in New York 
or Chicago. If the stratum carries gold or dia- 
monds here in the United States, then look for the 
same virtues, more or less, in India or Siberia. 

This is to say that there seem to be different 
selves, almost like persons, in us. We often remark 
this in others; we wonder which self will meet us in 
the morning? A delightful person may come to 
breakfast; he will smile on us; he will help us, at 
least for awhile; he will say Yes to our requests. 
But the chance is that a different person will appear, 
querulous, forbidding, disobliging; he will say No 
to us; he is capable of meannesses which we would 
not think credible. This is the alter ego, the other 
self in the same man. Here in each man is the field 



108 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

of moral distinctions; here is the fatal difference be- 
tween bad and good, sinner and saint, honest and 
dishonest, noble and base. Inhabiting the same 
individual, they make the most tremendous contrast 
in blacks and whites. What a mystery! What is 
the real man? Who knows? A fight seems to go 
on in a soul. Paul's Epistle to the Romans is all 
about this fight. The animal in the man, or per- 
haps a whole menagerie of creatures holds the bal- 
ance of power. 

They talk of the " soul of a nation." Is there 
ever such a thing? Is it desirable? The nation, 
like the millions of souls who make it, is diverse; it 
is swept as they are with passions, with prejudices, 
with lingering superstitions, with the mob instincts 
of the herd, as cruel and inhuman to-day as were 
ever the rage and vengeance of a Nero. On the 
other hand, these innumerable souls will answer to 
the call of a melody, of an orator, of a prophet, to 
the motions of sympathy or enthusiasm; a noble pas- 
sion is in them, feeling a common social pulse, to lay 
down their lives for humanity! The difference here 
is between the same people at their worst and at 
their best. Devils could not be worse than the soul 
of the people at their worst. Angels could hardly 
be better than the same people, when they show 
us their best. Their faces are transfigured. If 
they were always so, you could call them " the sons 
and daughters of God " ! Surely the nation, itself a 
myriad of discordant lives, has no soul or unity! 

The fact is, there are in us, or possible for us, two 



TWO LEVELS OF LIFE 1 09 

levels of life. The greatest differences of bad and 
good in the universe exist between these two levels. 
The higher level is the realm of the spirit. The 
lower level comprises everything below. Above, the 
man acts and behaves as a man; here his humanity 
distinguishes him. He is in the best company; any 
and every other man who stands on this level ap- 
proves and recognizes him as a comrade. Below, 
on the other hand, he is less than himself; he wan- 
ders; he keeps dubious company; even when held 
back from evil by the habits and the memories of 
his better self, he is subject to dangerous moods and 
subtle selfish temptations. Like a locomotive off 
its track, the fact of his native excellence, and the 
heavier momentum that he had while he ran on the 
track, now give him greater possible destructive- 
ness. Who have always contrived to steer their 
fellows to shipwreck, and balk the movements of 
progress so fatally, as the men who have dropped 
from the path of manly integrity and taken up 
service with the geocentric creatures on the level 
below? Search the list of the " Lost Leaders." 

It is as if there were a certain point of develop- 
ment about which men rise and fall, and rise and fall 
back again. They are like the amphibian born in 
the slime, on its way to become a bird and command 
the air. The creature struggles and grows and uses 
his wings, but men bob up and down, with no will to 
master the elements and make the winds serve them. 
They take pleasure in occasional moments of eleva- 
tion and vision, as they accept and enjoy a holiday 



HO A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

among the mountains; it does not occur to them that 
the happiest holiday is a sample and parable of what 
all days ought to be. 

We often say of a man: He has never " found 
himself." He may be a university man; he may 
wear a theologian's doctorate, or be a preacher of 
religion. In certain moods, in the presence of cer- 
tain persons, he is gracious, friendly and even de- 
vout. In other moods, no iceberg is more chilling 
and isolated. He is capable of injustices and false- 
hood. Do not call him a hypocrite. His better 
self is there as truly as in men of more positive and 
transparent character. He does touch the higher 
level. But he has never determined to live on that 
level, and be the real man whom nature destined him 
to be. He is still the slave of his pet indulgences. 
Most likely, as Newman said of himself, pride rules 
his will. What fatal waste of splendid human en- 
dowments ! 

A woman in this intermediate region is even more 
pathetic in proportion to the fineness of her nature. 
Unhappy lives, loving natures scorched and seared, 
affections unrequited, make up the story-teller's ma- 
terial. The gravest fault is not to grow. The an- 
cient word applies here: "The soul that sinneth 
(that is, fails to grow) shall die." This is no arbi- 
trary punishment, as of an angry God. It is the 
working of the beneficent conditions of life. The 
more delicate the flower, the more sure the law is, 
either to build life up, or to sap its beauty. The 



TWO LEVELS OF LIFE III 

woman, therefore, needs religion and suffers for the 
want of it, if possible more than the man. Her 
proper life and her glory is in and with the beautiful, 
gracious things of the spirit; her life is in all ways 
to minister to the service of love. Only so can her 
soul find peace, be in tune, find God, and impart the 
secret of restfulness. 

Every youth is apt to come to a time of change, 
confusion, and revolt from the old; of occasional 
flashes also of insight and longing for the unknown, 
the real and the infinite. The youth is put to it 
to find himself; to determine where he belongs, to 
which realm he will devote his life. As in the 
strange New Testament story of the temptation, he 
is taken into a high mountain and made to see all 
the kingdoms of the earth and to dare to put them 
aside; is taken up, too, into the realm of beauty and 
goodness, and made to hear a voice saying: "All 
things are yours; be sharer henceforth in the life, 
the power, the purpose, the vision of God." May 
not the world of mankind be near to a similar 
crisis? May we not be living at present in a sort 
of intermediate age, betwixt our worst and our best 
as a race, dimly feeling a new urgency acting on all 
lives to find themselves upon the new level of our 
common spiritual manhood? The childhood of the 
race lies behind us: our manhood lies before us. 
The whole world of man is thus in transition to a 
level where only the few ever found themselves 
yet. Therefore the present chaos and seeming 
moral confusion. Therefore the growing sense of 



112 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

necessary and coming change. To " find himself " 
for the youth is to begin his real life. For the 
world to find itself will be its first real civilization. 
To find one's self as a man is a new experience, 
but it has plenty of suggestive analogues. To learn 
any art or trade is a process of finding one's self. 
You begin without effectiveness or freedom. You 
begin with a careless waste of opportunities, like a 
child dancing on the beach without trying to plunge 
in and swim. Out of a time of bondage or appren- 
ticeship the master emerges. Gleams of success and 
happy attainment and alternating moods of depres- 
sion attend his progress and herald his attainment. 
At length and perhaps with a burst of surprise, you 
"find yourself." You no longer count the hours; 
the work now becomes gladsome, facile, effective, at 
times enthusiastic. I do not say utterly happy, 
without humiliating hours and feeble performance. 
Do the great masters of music or science never grow 
weary of their infinite task? The difference from 
what was before is, that now, when you drop from 
your freedom and mastery, or spoil the work of the 
day, you know it, and know also how to get your 
engine back on its track; you know how to turn your 
lapses into new mastery; you love your art and you 
can never renounce it. 

Stupid theologies, taught in divinity schools, have 
thrown around the new life displeasing names and 
a confusing cloud of absurd and forbidding mystery. 
The fact of finding oneself as a master of life, the 



TWO LEVELS OF LIFE 1 13 

discovery of a new level whereon man belongs — 
that which is something like falling in love — the 
one grand event of a life — has been made to seem 
alien and unreal. Those who are supposed to have 
passed through it have not half understood it. It 
has not been made to appear a matter of practical 
use, a happy secret of life, but to many, something 
forbidding. Even the " liberal " churches have 
made little or nothing of it. 

Would that when they told us of " the new life," 
or the " new birth " they had known how to set 
forth an idea as beautiful as Dante had seen in his 
vision ! Would that they had told us how this new 
birth into the realm of the spirit is as natural as 
the physical beginning of life ! They told us in- 
stead that we were born in sin, thus throwing disre- 
spect on the love of our parents. The process was 
said to be awfully sudden, whereas in fact it may 
be no more sudden than the birth of the spring time. 
Perhaps you will swim the first time you go into the 
water; most of us are slow in learning the motions. 
The great appeal has been made to a man's emo- 
tions and fears; whereas, the normal appeal is to 
the intelligence, the choice, the will, the whole self. 

When we put aside the supernatural, we put aside 
no ultimate fact. A mystery resides in all life. In 
all processes and phenomena and most of all in the 
deep heart of humanity, besides that which we " ex- 
plain " there is a fringe or overplus which no one ex- 
plains or defines. This mystery of life is not ir- 
rational; law and order proceed out of the mystery. 



H4 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

In this sense, the experience which we are stating is 
as if some life force — the creative will — springing 
out of the recesses of being, were with us and com- 
panioning us to the new level of manhood. Differ- 
ent persons describe it in different terms; most men 
do not even try to describe it. " I know," said the 
man born blind, " that, whereas I was blind, now I 
see." " Last year," says the young swimmer, " I 
was afraid of the water; now I love it." Another 
says, " I cannot remember when I first learned to 
swim." " I learned," says another, " with the help 
of my father." 

No " conversion " or spiritual change, however, 
is good for much which is not a permanent change. 
It is the change from the selfish life to the social life, 
from self-will to good will. Most conversions, for 
example, in revivals, are disappointing because there 
is no real change in the will. What a bona fide 
change does for a man is shown in the classic story 
of Paul. The " old man " and the new man are 
here set off by contrast. The Saul whom men knew 
in Tarsus and at the official council in Jerusalem 
was essentially hard, strict, and implacable, and bent 
on procuring punishment for a pestilent sect. He 
was clothed in the hardly-earned self-righteousness 
of his caste. The new Paul " found himself " and, 
more important yet, was found by others, gentle, 
kindly, socially-minded, and bent on saving people 
from any need of punishment. One of his new 
marks is that he is capable of confessing his faults 
or mistakes ! He is not asking to be rewarded and 



TWO LEVELS OF LIFE 1 15 

praised or even loved. He has become a lover of 
men. The grand new motion of the good will has 
caught his life. 

That which came to Paul is a new spirit; call 
it the spirit of religion or the spirit of humanity; 
they are one. The working of this spirit is the 
same with every one who finds himself. The fruits 
or results are the same. Before, the man was noth- 
ing more than his own master; he is now every 
one's friend; that is, a master of life. Not as hav- 
ing attained perfectness, but as committed and de- 
voted to the attainment; as going heart and mind 
and will and all with its beautiful motion. There 
are unfathomable heights and depths in this art of 
life! 

We may detest war and yet learn from it. It 
is a tremendous venture ; so is life. It demands en- 
listment; so does the good life. It demands the 
whole man and not part of him; so does the. new 
life. It asks a certain abandon; the soldier enlists 
to give and not to get. Life on the new level is like- 
wise a wholesale and gladsome abandon. " It is 
more happy to give than to receive." The soldier's 
life is for its period the one thing. Paul said the 
same of his life: " This one thing I do." What do 
you want to say better than that? Like Gen. Arm- 
strong, founder of the great Hampton School, you 
thus choose the biggest life-purpose there is. The 
soldier must be ready to die. So must any true 
man. Life has in it perpetual ventures and risks. 



Il6 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

Who wishes to run away from them? To run away 
is to die — as a man. The soldier is known by his 
courage. The man of good will adds to the sol- 
dier's courage the eternal and costlier thing — the 
courage of the free soul, unafraid of what man says 
or does. 

A strange paradox offers itself in the life of the 
soldier. I do not mean the conscript. For con- 
scription is despotism. I mean the volunteer. He 
is doing that which he wills to do. To be willing to 
die is a will to live ! The philosopher means this 
when he propounds as the secret of life the idea: 
" To die to live." The word whatsoever runs like 
a refrain through the New Testament. It stands 
for the infinite and absolute reality underlying 
human life. I enlist not merely to do this finite 
thing, a and its next, b ) and so on, but I enlist with 
a wholesale trust to do x, the unknown and y, the 
next unknown, and so on, beyond my sight. This 
could not be in an irrational universe. My trust is 
based in the essential reason, unity and beneficence 
which I find in the spiritual order of life, to which 
I belong. 

The soldier offering up life and happiness gets, as 
a rule, what he gives away; namely, larger flow of 
life and zest. They call it " sacrifice." It is sacri- 
fice for the unwilling and unknowing. It is gain and 
access of life to the man who offers all for any cause 
above himself. This is the mystic consecration, 
which we gladly recognize as shrouding the memory 
of the young patriot of any nation, who knowing 



TWO LEVELS OF LIFE 117 

nothing higher and doing his best, dies for his coun- 
try. Wasteful as it seems in his case, it is an act 
of good will. The time must come when the leaders 
and fathers of men, who like the kings and priests 
of old, have sent their boys through the fire, will 
learn how to use life for a larger humanity than has 
ever been discovered on the battlefield. Then they 
shall see that no conduct, public or private, can ever 
be righteous or worth dying for, which does not 
carry with the chivalrous emotions and the weight 
of the moral judgment, the friendliness of the par- 
ticipants and respect for all men. 

Have we made the difference clear between the 
man who lives above and the man who lives below 
the level of his manhood? It is the difference be- 
tween your best self and your lower self. To quote 
an old teacher's word, " There are only two kinds of 
men in this world — those who seek to do the will 
of God, and those who do not." Translate this as 
you please. It overrules all other distinctions — 
mental ability, natural endowments, skill and edu- 
cation. It makes a brotherhood of all souls who 
follow the good will of God. 

Jesus bade the rich young man to sell all that he 
had and come with him. Was this too much? Any 
young soldier has to do it. No matter whether 
Jesus' ultimatum needs to be taken literally or 
not. The idea is the same. The infinitely venture- 
some word whatsoever lies at the heart of the sen- 
tence. Whatever the good will asks, you must do. 
What better thing can you do? 



Il8 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

It is as if the Master of Life were saying to each 
of us: Do this one thing: take my light, share it, re- 
flect it at every angle, pour my life through your 
being, incorporate the universal good will like beauty 
into the works of your hands, and make it prevail. 
So shall you live, so others shall live about you, 
through you, beyond your sight; so generations after 
you, never knowing your name, shall have richer 
life. To do this is the " great adventure." In 
short, to seek to do and dare throughout life all that 
the soldier can do or dare for his country for the 
time of the war; to do with friendly face and useful 
tools for all mankind, what the soldier can never do 
with hostile mind and murderous weapons — noth- 
ing less than this is the scope of our enterprise. 
Is it not possible? 

I suggested that when once the world of mankind 
" finds itself," as a whole, as a movement and a des- 
tiny — no one word covers our thought — this will 
be civilization. The world does not need to remain 
in its present chaos and discord. Already deep hu- 
manitarian and social forces are urging men into na- 
tions, leagues and federations. Already men wait 
for nobler leadership; they cry for the voice of the 
prophet; they would thrill to the call of the trumpet 
sounding the march; they would rally to undertake 
a democracy for all nations, to be won no longer by 
killing, but by such simple good will as every woman 
and child can contribute. Once set a fashion this 
way, once proclaim its crusade in homes and shops, 



TWO LEVELS OF LIFE 1 19 

in schoolhouses and temples, and who shall say how 
soon it may be the rule of the world ! 

" I will overturn and overturn and overturn," 
says the old text, " till he whose right it is shall 
reign." Let man try, if he must, every other mode 
of life. Nevertheless, the good way remains; at 
last man shall stand in it. The word shall be 
spoken, " This is the way; walk ye in it." The 
best is inevitable when the time for it comes. 

Is this inevitable best too costly for us? I am 
aware how costly man still makes it seem. The 
voices of those who preach the current religion are 
not prophetic. The stubborn Pharisaism of the 
prosperous classes with their pride of power still 
stands in the way. The futile and crazy cost lav- 
ished in carrying on war is not the cost which pur- 
chases humanity or brotherhood. Civilization 
comes at a more lavish cost of good will. Who 
dares to say that those are yet in sight to furnish 
the cost? Sometime the supply must rise to meet 
the demand. As Nietzsche says, " When the dis- 
tress is greatest, the help may be nearest to hand." 

The fact is that man normally loves to do good 
and be good. He is fundamentally social, and en- 
joys social service. Goodness is one with useful- 
ness. To live socially, usefully, cordially, is to en- 
ter into the circulation of life. Man hitherto has 
thought goodness a form of self-culture. This has 
not appealed to him. Henceforth he must know 
that every useful thing he does or says or thinks is 



120 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

his gift for all men. His growing trust in men, his 
sympathies, his expectation to find good in them, go 
to increase the circulation of the common life of the 
world. He has been taken into the vast telephone 
system of the universe. Messages, warnings, cries 
for help, words of good cheer come over his line. 
Man is made to love this common life. 



VII 

EVIL: WHAT TO MAKE OF IT 

The monster stumbling-block in the way of faith in 
the good is the standing presence of evil. It looms 
up before men to-day more terrible than ever. Men 
are more sensitive and more sympathetic. In this 
modern telephone world we daily hear of every ap- 
palling mischance, till we lose our sense of perspec- 
tive and think of life as a medley of suffering and 
malignity. Many people have become shy of pro- 
fessing a belief in God. An evil God is unimagin- 
able, an indifferent God is worse than useless. But 
how can a loving and good God tolerate evil? Or, 
if the God idea is somehow irrepressible, how far 
has He power or responsibility? 

It has become almost orthodox to hold a belief in 
a limited God, who has to struggle as we do; who 
may fail as we fail; whom it is our business to help ! 
Mr. H. G. Wells has made this idea popular. The 
marvelous conception of a universe of spiritual in- 
tegrity beyond the touch of hurt — of reality of 
which the mountains are only a shadow — of a one- 
ness and a sureness above the heavens, on which the 
souls of the greatest thinkers, like the hearts of lit- 
tle children, have rested, without which mankind 
would seem orphaned indeed, seems now to dissolve. 

121 



122 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

But neither heart nor soul nor mind is satisfied. 
How can we, once having conceived the All-wise and 
All-good, ever admire or worship, or even respect, 
a partial, limited, finite, blundering deity, not yet 
grown up, unsure of himself? Our souls cry out 
for the living God, for the infinite and perfect in wis- 
dom and goodness. We find in ourselves and in 
other men also a semblance of the same indestructi- 
ble quality of the infinite ! We instinctively wor- 
ship only the perfection of goodness. This is the 
tremendous dilemma and the problem of evil. 

Let us leave behind for the present these vast in- 
quiries. Let us not push too far afield to find 
ground for our faith. How could man ever have 
faith, unless it is impregnably founded within us; if 
our spiritual nature, evidencing itself in human life, 
is not itself reality? Let us not throw away our 
faith before we make frank inquiry what it is which 
we call evil. Does it belong in the realm of reality? 
Is it real, in the sense in which we men are real? 

Is evil a principle? Certainly not. There is no 
ultimate principle of evil, as there is a principle of 
truth. Is evil a person? Our fathers, following 
the lead of Persian mythology, said, Yes. They 
imagined an evil potentate and a great hierarchy of 
devils. God was responsible for the good in the 
world. The devils did the rest. But who was 
responsible for the devils? Who kept the fires of 
hell? We have pushed away this imagery as pre- 
posterous. Not only is there no evidence for belief 
in Satan, but the belief is bad " pragmatically " ; that 



evil: what to make of it 123 

is, it is unwholesome. It adds a needless imaginary 
burden to other evils. It leads men to expect and 
therefore to suffer evils which otherwise would not 
exist. There is no particle of proof that evil is a 
person, or a unity. There can be no self-existence 
in a negation. Evils are in things, in men, in our- 
selves. But no evil like the mythical serpent in the 
garden ever spoke to us ! 

There is, then, no malice, no ugly or cruel intent 
in evil. The storm wrecks your ship, but no touch 
of malice is in its " angry waves." Seen from a 
cliff they are beautiful. The mosquito, the croco- 
dile, the tiger are evil only by a metaphor. They 
have no hatred, no wicked purpose; they never plot 
injury against you. In their swamp or jungle they 
are neither good nor evil, so far as you are con- 
cerned. The pain of the toothache, so far from 
carrying malice, has an actual use which may serve 
to save our tooth. Malice is not in evil, but in per- 
sons. The only persons of whom we know anything, 
who bear malice, are men. But malice in men is like 
a disease or deformity. It does not belong to them 
as men. So far as it is evil, it is remediable. We 
shall return later to the subject of evil in men. 

If evil exists in things, it is not evil in itself, but 
only as related to us, who get into its way. The 
mote or beam in one's eye is innocent anywhere else. 
The morass is not evil or inconvenient till man needs 
a road through it. Is it evil that the Culebra Hill 
keeps on sliding into our Panama Canal? What do 
you expect if you burrow into the side of a moun- 



124 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

tain? Such accidents endanger dividends and cause 
disappointment and suffering. Do you always ex- 
pect dividends without any untoward conditions? 
With each new invention or enterprise, the electric 
light or the aeroplane, we stir up a fresh group of 
" evils," of which we had been unaware. They are 
only evil as related to our enterprise. To the 
learner in flying, the hardness of the earth is an evil ! 

What now if you enter complaint against pain, 
suffering, broken limbs, broken hearts, in short, 
against our sensitive nerves? Is consciousness then 
the evil one, who makes pain for us? Or do you go 
with certain Hindu philosophers and altogether de- 
precate consciousness? This means not to wish to 
live; the mystery of life runs thus into pessimism; 
but all healthy people prefer to keep their conscious- 
ness. 

Suppose we could vote out of the world all that 
side of life which we class as evil. There shall be 
no pain, no tears, no disease, no failure, no disap- 
pointment, no fatigue, no hunger or thirst, no occa- 
sion of fear, no shadow of death; of course, also no 
crime, injustice, hatred, cruelty, insult, blows; no 
punishments, no fighting nor oppression; no risks of 
hurt, physical or spiritual, shall be possible; no tre- 
mendous ventures shall be asked of any one. Every- 
thing shall be made smooth, prosperous, easy, ample. 
Do you like the prospect? 

Be sure what this means. Does it mean anything 
significant or satisfying? What would you do with 
yourself? You would never have any pressing 



evil: what to make of it 125 

necessities or urgent desires. You would never need 
to build a house or protect yourself against cold or 
storm or heat. Would you love your children? 
They would cost you no more than the young of a 
codfish; you would never need to do anything for 
them; they would not suffer from neglect and ex- 
posure, nor would you ever be anxious for their wel- 
fare. Would you enjoy the company of your 
friends? But you never could do anything for them. 
They would all have plenty of potatoes or bananas; 
they could not possibly come to want. You could 
never read soul-stirring stories or poems, or expe- 
rience the thrill of a drama. That which stirs the 
soul and makes the thrills, flows out of a reservoir 
of experience, from suffering, dread, awe, reverence, 
victory. Sympathy is the key to the scenes of the 
story or drama. Sympathy is to suffer with; there 
is no sympathy and no use for it in the merely sensual 
world which we seek to imagine. Who would not 
rather vote for this strange world of struggle, sin 
and death, where nevertheless courage, integrity, 
faith, hope, sympathy, and good will are unconquer- 
able by evil ! 

But perhaps you would rebuild your world with 
a moderate and comfortable degree of "evil"? 
You would have just enough to make no serious 
trouble or cause for anxiety. Is it evil, then, if you 
need a modicum, like so much salt, to mix with your 
good? Is it only evil when any one gets too much? 
Is evil possibly an excess of a good? Pray how 
much would you recommend before you cry 



126 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

" enough "? Some pain, but not too much; a little 
touch of suffering; children's diseases, perhaps, but 
no smallpox or plague ; rain and wind, but no torna- 
does or lightning strokes; slight but never heavy 
frosts or blights ; just enough care to keep the farmer 
busy; a little, but never colossal selfishness; pardon- 
able pride, but no arrogance; mild quarrels, but no 
deadly wars; no bitterness, no tragedies; no extrem- 
ities of struggle for food or life; an easy death, if 
death must still stand at the end of the way! And 
if ever terrible mishap threatened to befall the man 
or the race, as has ever and anon befallen the world, 
the Master of Life should interfere with the kindly 
wand of his power ! 

Would you also tame the visible world down to 
match your program? Lower the mountains, re- 
move dangerous cliffs, annihilate tigers and wolves, 
vote swamps and deserts out of your country, ask for 
fertile lands everywhere? Do you expect still to 
keep in your safe earth strenuous, daring, invincible 
men, a courage unafraid of peril, the love that poets 
sing, watchful devotion, infinite enthusiasm, all-em- 
bracing good will? 

Your Utopia of moderate and well-tamed " evil " 
calls for nothing that gives human life its distinc- 
tion. No great history is possible, no Christ, no 
Socrates, no Garibaldi, is wanted. Your well-kept, 
safely insured children could never hear the story 
of a hero. Could you ever be civilized in your world 
of limited " evil " ? How could you know the spirit- 
ual values? Your tame life would not even be 



evil: what to make of it 127 

earned; it would not be your own! Ask something 
harder, if you wish to be men, the sons of God. 
Perhaps we shall find that this is just the kind of 
world to make men ! 

There is a form of complaint, however, about the 
world which deserves careful respect. It is on the 
score of the overwhelming injustice that falls to the 
lot of the innocent, of both men and animals. They 
suffer who have deserved no ill, much less punish- 
ment. They suffer from others' cruelty or greed; 
they do the hardest work for the smallest pay. 
They suffer in horrible wars, compelled to die for 
the quarrels of their oppressors. And high heaven 
sees this astonishing process of injustice go on 
through the ages ! It seems as if injustice were em- 
bedded in the core of things. If those only suffered 
who deserve to suffer ! 

A curious misapprehension survives here from the 
legend of the Garden of Eden! The great and 
naive idea was that evil is the fruit of disobedience. 
Once no pain was, or poisonous weed, or death. 
But Evil rushed into the world like a flood the mo- 
ment Adam took the fatal fruit. Every one knows 
now that pain and death were here before man was. 
Pain and " evil " like bad weather come to all of 
us; the good Job may suffer much or little; the 
tyrant likewise. There is suffering from a kind con- 
science that comes only to the virtuous, like the pain 
of a discord to the musician. There are kinds of 
suffering that fit certain offenses and warn men 
against them. Thus, sensual indulgence brings the 



128 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

decay of body and mind. Even here in the nature 
of things, suffering cannot come to the evil-doer 
without involving others. We are social beings in- 
extricably locked up with each other's weal or woe. 
Do you wish to be unlinked from the bonds of society 
for the sake of your tiny conception of personal 
justice? 

What is justice? What does any man deserve? 
No one knows, least of all the man himself, who gen- 
erally claims more than belongs to him. Moreover, 
no one can spell the meaning of justice, till he finds 
out what life means. What is life for? It is not 
measured for men by what we get of food or pay, 
least of all by the pleasures that come to us. It is 
measured by what we do, what we express, what we 
become as men. What if suffering serves in the 
making of a man's life? What if the greatest boon 
in the world is to share, as simple men daily share, 
in expressing the infinite good-will ? Now this mode 
of experience never could be without suffering man's 
common lot. What if progress comes, as men are 
enabled more and more willingly to share in what- 
ever concerns the welfare of all? Those who know 
most assure us that this is so. The people who, 
though innocent, suffer and toil above the average, 
actually attain the power both to enjoy life and to 
increase the common welfare. Is not the universe 
then doing its best for us? There is that which is 
higher than justice and surpasses our little measure 
of justice. You say " the world — or God — is not 
fair." How do you know, unless you have honestly 



evil: what to make of it 129 

tried a way, which thousands of men tell you has 
not only given them a new sympathy with all who 
suffer, but has also rendered them invulnerable to 
the sting of injustice ? 

Certain obvious remarks about evil now occur to 
us. In the first place, of most things that men class 
as evil, we never know till afterwards whether they 
are evil or good. The good may turn out to be 
evil, the gain to be loss, and the evil often works 
for good. What if a man loses his fortune? His 
having it may have been the worst thing that ever 
happened to him. Perhaps he had never earned 
it. Its loss may be the beginning of real and true 
life. Epictetus says that the blows of his boxing 
teacher were good for him. The men who thought 
them evil never learned to box. Dr. Howe, the 
great lover of the blind, used to say, " An obstacle 
is something to be overcome." He put the obstacles 
into the day's work, till all work became like play. 

A man reviewing his life, and having the key to 
its meaning, may find that nothing has been evil to 
him. He has learned lessons from suffering, from 
rebuke and criticism, from injustices done him, from 
illness and physical limitations, from being defeated 
and humiliated, from innumerable petty sufferings 
and disappointments, so borne as to broaden his 
views and make him a grown and mature man. 
Such a man can say to the last, " The best is yet 
to be ! " Our good religion enables us thus to take 
over all kinds of experiences and to translate them 



130 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

out of the field of chaos or evil into the orderly con- 
structive realm of the good. Paul knew the secret, 
" in all things to be content." Browning knows this 
secret when he cries, " Then welcome each rebuff 
that turns earth's smoothness rough." Where does 
not evil offer itself, like the malarial swamps, to be 
converted into good? 

Again, there is in life a deep law of contrast, of 
darkness and light, pain and pleasure, hunger and 
satisfaction, evil and good. We call the reverse 
side evil. Is it evil? Is the darkness evil? Evil, 
if one is lost in the woods; very good to the tired 
workman. How could we learn anything, or know 
the real good from the false, without the perpetual 
contrast? " No night there ! " This would be good 
only to those who arrive out of the night. How 
could you know justice, truth, love, unless you have 
known the opposites, and found out what is perma- 
nent? Could the child ever learn to know and love 
the good self, without having been tired, pained, 
humiliated, by the ugly doings of his selfish self? 

Thus contrast, with its reverse or seamy side, 
proves to be a form of language or punctuation, in 
which nature speaks to us. It comes as the waves 
come ; it carries you up and it drops you down. You 
would like to remain and ride on the top of the 
wave — never to sink to the trough of the sea. You 
want the heights, not the depths, motion and no ar- 
rest. Omnipotence could not do this for you. Om- 
nipotence cannot accomplish irrationality! 

Another principle in life is the law of cost or 



evil: what to make of it 131 

effort. It seemed once evil that man has to " earn 
his bread with the sweat of his brow " ; work was a 
curse, brought on man by sin. Who thinks so now? 
Whittle the cost down as much as you can; invent all 
possibly machinery to reduce labor ; get a four-hour 
day for the world, if you can; still the beneficent law 
stands. You could know and prize and enjoy no 
value low or high without it. Dream if you will of 
getting power and life for nothing. Would it be 
good for us? Is it then too much cost and effort 
that you reprobate? The question of good and 
evil is relative. Who knows what is too much to 
pay for an education, for a truth, for a faith, for 
your love? He who pays most often loves most. 
The evil is to pay for worthless things. Even this 
may not be evil, before you have found out their 
worthlessness. You cannot know the gold without 
knowing brass also. 

Dr. Felix Adler in his suggestive book, " An Ethi- 
cal Philosophy of Life," calls " frustration " a good 
part of life. As soon as we make any gain we are 
presently restrained and held back. Is frustration, 
however, the right word to use ? Frustration hurts 
and kills; it carries the suspicion of an enemy or 
frustrator. The word is another negative form for 
our friendly law of effort and cost. Call it also 
inertia or friction. These two have their obvious 
use. They point to the price at which good things 
come to beings who grow under finite conditions and 
march a step at a time. 

Quarrel, if you must, with the fact of our finite- 



132 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

ness ; quarrel with the fact of evolution ; with the fact 
that we are small before we are large; quarrel with 
life and the costly fact of consciousness. Mean- 
while, whoever learns to say, " Thy will be done," 
the good-will be done, has life more abundantly, in 
the only way possible. Life to him is good — fric- 
tion, limitations, frustration, effort, ventures, cost, 
pain, and all; to him death, too, which only is known 
as touching the body, is also good. The simple ex- 
periment of treating the universe as essentially good, 
and not evil, as " God's world," and not a devil's 
world, does this for any one who will try it. 

Another good word, not always pleasing at first 
but good in the end, is urgency. It is constructive 
and purposeful, forever pressing us to live and grow. 
The inertia, the friction, the frustration, the pain, 
now becomes an incitement and challenge to us, to 
our intelligence, our imagination, our highest de- 
sires, our friendship, devotion, and sympathy. This 
is a fact of daily experience. Whenever our mettle 
is tried, our stature is strengthened. The urging 
life-force boils up against the restraining earthy mass 
and sweeps it aside. The man's self asserts his will 
over physical weakness and masters desire; it stiffens 
itself against storm and cold, and builds protection 
for its little ones; it wearies of the pest-breeding 
slums of its towns, and rouses itself to clean them 
up. It is stirring now in millions of minds to ban 
war from the earth. Humanity grows apace with 
every effort to which uncomfortable strictures, pain- 
ful hurts, sorry disasters, crushing disappointments 



evil: what to make of it 133 

succeeding each other, urge men to strive and climb 
and overcome. The word of the Master of Life 
comes clear the oftener you heed it : March ! For- 
ward! To obey is "life more abundant." The 
only really evil world would be that in which living 
things could be allowed to grow rank and vile, and 
not to " die game." 

Why not frankly say now what must have been 
suggested already, that " evil," by whatever name 
it is called, is an ultimate necessity in a phenomenal 
world? It is a necessary condition of the everlast- 
ing process by which we live and grow. A growing 
world must contain the smaller and the greater, the 
worse and the better, the shadows as well as the 
substance; no monotonous, uniform equality as of 
standardized machines. There must be inevitable 
suffering in a process where animals live and infants 
grow to maturity. 

Verify this in the actual processes of child devel- 
opment. Can you have mature life without child- 
life first, with its inevitable feebleness, pains and 
restraints? Would you desire to enter upon man- 
hood without knowing the joys of the child and the 
mother's love? Who is sorry to have borne child- 
ish disappointments, to have fallen down as other 
children fall, to have been humiliated and ashamed 
over and over, to have learned to love truth by the 
futility of falsehood, to have been frustrated and 
to have grown more forceful? 

Choose again the best fortune for your children. 



134 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

How much would you spare them of the cost of 
growing up? Should the child fall and not suffer, 
cut himself and be made to believe that there was no 
wound, overeat and indulge his appetites and never 
have aches and pains? Should he have no eager 
desires, no real temptations? Would you have him 
inherit a fortune? Would you make him exempt 
from the great common lot of the children about 
him? 

Many people suppose that the all-powerful God 
can do anything. But Omnipotence cannot make a 
man without a child to begin with. Omnipotence 
cannot dispense in favor of a single child, whether 
the Christ-child or the Superman, with the inevitable, 
democratic, beneficent law of cost by which all grow- 
ing creatures must come to their stature. Omnip- 
otence cannot command a valley without any hill ! 
This is irrationality. 

Let us then, as Emerson says, " worship " the in- 
exorable and beautiful necessity. Let us admit that 
life at its best is worth a price beyond measure in 
effort or pain. Our religion will be all the better for 
combining a noble stoicism with it. Meanwhile the 
things that we call evil fade and disappear like fogs 
on the sea-shore, when the west wind brings the sun- 
shine rippling the waves. What cost is too great to 
give for a share in the things unseen, eternal, spirit- 
ual, most real, most beautiful, in which men, born 
as little children, grow up to be heirs ! 



SECTION III 
THE VICTORIOUS GOODNESS 

I 

HOW TO HANDLE EVIL: THE IRREPRESSIBLE 
CONFLICT 

We have nowhere denied that there is evil; we do 
not say that a pain or a sorrow does not exist, that 
a disease is not as real as the blight upon a wheat 
field. But we have pointed out that evil is only one 
of the various names by which we call one side or 
aspect of a great, necessary and, on the whole, bene- 
ficent condition of our lives, as finite growing beings 
in a world of things. Neither is this necessity that 
brings pain or evil material; it belongs to life and 
growth, and finiteness. 

Back of the " evil " we have nowhere been able 
to find any evil principle. Not even moral evil con- 
tains any actual malignity. The wrong-doer does 
not love evil or hate the good. The infantile rage 
and impish face of your child carry no proof of 
demoniac possession. 

Are we gaining any advantage, however, by this 
view? Of course we are, if it is true. But sup- 

135 



136 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

pose this view prevails, will the world not lose its 
sense of the awfulness of sin? Can you safely leave 
average man with no fear of hell fire? What will 
hold the grip of our consciences? 

Our best physicians answer this question. They 
do not need to add any punishment to what their pa- 
tients suffer already. Their business is to cure the 
sick. They use confinement, special diet, and need- 
ful warning to the careless; they may use the salu- 
tary knife. They thus direct and apply intelligent 
and positive purpose. But they do not make disease 
attractive or popular. Nevertheless, the atmos- 
phere of the hospital is not fear but courage and 
hope. The end is health. We propose the same 
practical purpose, the same wholesome means, the 
same hopeful atmosphere. On the practical side 
this is the doctrine of " the forgiveness of sins." 

Blame and guilt, the sense of sin, the wounded 
conscience, have one use only, that the man, having 
done wrong, may be ashamed and sorry enough to 
resolve not to do the wrong again. He is like the 
chauffeur who has blundered into an accident. We 
wish him to see his fault and be so grieved that he 
may never incur another accident. He is unfit to 
drive a car if he remains careless. We are not con- 
cerned that he shall suffer punishment, but that from 
now on he shall be a careful driver. This he never 
can be without a better will, without courage and 
hope, without friendly confidence too on the part of 
those who employ him. 

The larger part of the wrong doing of the world 



HOW TO HANDLE EVIL 1 37 

is not aggressive. It is the work of dull and imma- 
ture minds. Like children at school, they need the 
steady play upon their wills of courage and hope. 
Our view of the nature of moral evil therefore 
frankly involves a distinctly radical change in our 
treatment of one another when we do wrong. 

Perhaps the worst mischief in the old view of 
" sin " was that it drew a false division among men. 
There were sheep and goats, saints and sinners, the 
bad and the good. God " was angry with the 
wicked every day." But he loved the righteous, 
that is, us and our sect or religion. More than half 
of the Hebrew Psalms contain mischievous and in- 
humane sentences about the separateness of the good 
and the evil. You make prigs and hypocrites by 
using such material for " devotional " purposes. 
Children and thoughtless people become infected 
with the ugly temper of such Scripture. If God has 
enemies, you find enemies too. You develop ill-will, 
contempt, hatred. If God punishes relentlessly, you 
deal in the same kind of treatment. Punishment in 
this view is retribution or vengeance to give the evil- 
doer his deserts. A terrible stream of mischief has 
marked this superstition, that sin is a malign princi- 
ple at endless war with good! 

Our view of moral evil grows out of a new light 
on human life. We are here, first, to grow and 
work out good, and, incidentally to this, to overcome 
evil or cure it. We worship no despotic or igno- 
rant God, feeble enough to have enemies. " He 
hateth nothing that he hath made." Surely if " to 



138 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

know all is to forgive all," then the fountain life of 
the world can harbor no grudge. 

This view sets us all on one plane. As Jesus says, 
" Why callest thou me good? None is good but 
one; that is, God." No man is impeccable, no one 
outside of the human fold. Do you wish or de- 
serve to M sit on thrones," judging the others? 
Who deserves such pre-eminence? The best men 
owe everything to the indwelling and up-building 
life. Who made the sound body, the clear intelli- 
gence, the discerning conscience, the love of beauty, 
the love of truth, the love of goodness? There is 
no self-made man! 

This social oneness in weal and woe, for good and 
evil, in pleasure and pain, constitutes a bond which 
makes us inevitable sharers in human experiences. 
All human society is involved in every strike, in 
every war. Do you and I imagine that, if we had 
been brought up in slums, we should have supposed 
the laws and the courts to have been created for our 
benefit? Would it have been possible for us if we 
had been born in Germany to show penitence in the 
face of our proud " enemies " over the sins of our 
nation? What a coil of social circumstances breeds 
wrong and crime ! The worst moral evil is largely 
the survival from primitive men who never knew 
how to be rid of it. The practical question is, what 
to do to-day? If you blame any one, who are more 
to blame than those with power, virtue, and means, 
and yet without sympathy? Talk not, however, of 
blame, but inspire us with courage and hope. The 



HOW TO HANDLE EVIL 1 39 

worst man on earth can become a new creature the 
moment he catches the new social light upon life, 
and takes a willing hold in the fraternal effort to 
overcome evil. Men become wicked for want of 
courage, hope, and will. Stir these men with a good 
will and they escape the region of evil. 

What absurd mystery people have made of Jesus' 
teaching: " Resist not evil"! It is perfectly clear 
a few sentences later in the parable of the sun, for- 
ever shedding light on the evil and the good. Be 
ye each like the sun, Jesus says: be lights to shine; 
mirror back in every direction all the light that falls 
on you. Return not evil for evil, but good to over- 
whelm evil. "Overcome evil?" Yes. This is 
your business, but overcome it with good. This 
makes the business of life positive, constructive, 
beautiful. This is to put the emphasis where it be- 
longs, not on the evil, the incident, but on good, the 
reality! 

Men had always taken the opposite way; namely, 
resist evil, fight it! This meant to stay in its com- 
pany, to fight it on its own ground, and with its own 
weapons of violence and destruction. We are re- 
minded of Xerxes whipping the Hellespont ! 

All sorts of interesting analogies and parables now 
help us. See what we do with the problems of 
physical nature. We actually transfer to our aid, 
and make over as allies, forces and materials that 
we once thought hostile. Who thinks of fighting 
the wind? We borrow its power to drive our sails. 
We hold the floods back to supply our needs in 



140 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

drought. We drain the malarial marsh and turn 
it into a garden. We find new uses in refuse and 
weeds. Instead of being impatient at opposition, 
we good-naturedly bring well planned and superior 
forces to reduce it. We do not fight the rocks; we 
bore through them, and build highways of their 
fragments. The very language of early man's 
struggles with nature becomes our metaphor and 
poetry. The word fight loses its sting where no 
malignity is. 

We urge now the same radical change of method 
throughout the whole moral realm. This is the 
heart of our religion; it is the demand of our intelli- 
gence; it is the hope of humanity, which never be- 
fore had much hope, except beyond the clouds. 

Our law is: " Overcome evil with good." Keep 
this in mind. This principle works wonderfully in 
taming the excess selfishness in us. Do not treat it 
as an enemy. We cannot fight this excess or lop it 
off like an excrescence. Translate it and overpass 
it with surplus of life — with wholesome energy, 
with a generous aim. Selfishness is a hindrance, a 
limitation, an extra weight of flesh. It grows upon 
the idle and lazy. Fill up your life, then, with use- 
ful effort and work the weight off. 

You fear social changes lest you and your house- 
hold may come to want or lose your luxuries. You 
cannot kill this fear or starve it out. Turn the 
other way: join hands with others who have real 
reasons to fear; plant wider fields; plan for grander 
harvests; learn freer and better methods to exchange 



HOW TO HANDLE EVIL 14 1 

and share your products. Lo ! as it was in the story 
of " the multiplication of the loaves," where every 
one has brought out his resources there is more than 
enough for all. 

You fear for the nation, for its liberties and its 
wealth; other peoples will come and rob you. The 
old way was to build forts, to erect tariff walls, to 
fence in the little nation's prosperity, to keep ships 
ready to fight: the nations stood thus in perpetual 
fear. Turn about now: take the opposite course; 
overcome your ugly suspicions. Raze your forts; 
let the battleships rust. Welcome the labor and 
product of others; let each contribute his share; pub- 
lish your secrets; trust the others as you wish to be 
trusted. Is any mighty nation your enemy? No! 
Your own fear, your suspicion, your enmity, is the 
enemy. Tell all peoples your new democratic plan 
for the freedom and safety of the world. Believe 
in it yourselves; make the enemy nations equal 
shareholders in it; draw the teeth of your fears. 

Our worst enemies are within our doors. Envy 
and jealousy are enemies. They narrow our happi- 
ness. The other man is more prosperous; he is 
stronger and better educated; he has more friends. 
The other woman is more beautiful and has more 
money to spend, or uses meretricious arts and gets 
on, you think, too well. Thus children, too dull and 
weak to open the gates, cry and kick against them. 
Thus nations slip into contemptible quarrels and 
wars. You cannot fight jealousy! Turn the other 
way; put your better nature to work. You have 



142 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

your own life to live. Make it worth while. You 
are here to make light shine, to help the good to 
prevail, to enhance the common prosperity, to carry 
the good will from thought and word into deed. 
Be glad then for every other man's gifts and powers. 
The other student is brighter; the other girl has 
greater charm; the other physician is more skilful; 
the other merchant is richer. What of it? Your 
school, your town, your nation — the world, has so 
much more intellect, grace, skill, means. Would 
you restrict others to your little capacity? Take 
care rather to make your own product larger and 
more excellent. Stop praying, " Thy Kingdom 
come " unless you mean this. 

What shall we do with our quick anger, our sul- 
len resentment, our " honest indignation " against 
evil-doing? Keep what is honest. We should not 
be human if we did not suffer at seeing wrong, at 
hearing discords and falsehood. But again, as be- 
fore, our enemy is within. Our annoyance, our ir- 
ritation, our " righteous anger," as we style it, are 
enemies. We are never annoyed, irritated, indig- 
nant, because we are full of good will, but rather 
because we have not good will enough. Our feel- 
ings are hurt at others' ingratitude, not because we 
are generous, but because we are narrow and little. 
We seek to punish, before we know how to pity. 
The one specific and certain prescription for us is not 
to give any one else cause for " righteous indignation 
against us." Is our neighbor useless? You and 
I then must be so much more useful. Is he doing 



HOW TO HANDLE EVIL 143 

harm? We must be sure, then, to do good. Our 
hot indignation is the mark of our likeness to him 
who has irritated us. 

My irritability and angry heart are not for 
nothing. Like raw material they have the making 
of good in them. What if I transform them like 
wild energy into so much heat and light ! I can do 
this with my intelligence. Good will always does it; 
sympathy shows me the way. Every case of wrong 
doing is an opportunity. I am set to help the 
wrong doer. I am like a messenger to light the 
way; my good will is my torch. My arrogance, my 
vexation, my one-sided sympathy, my harsh judg- 
ment pass off; my life purpose to do my part for 
the common good emerges. 

We need to know that we are each worth while, 
that no man can ever be thrown quite out of the 
family of mankind. There is some useful function 
for him, if only to stand patient at the loneliest out- 
post. The humblest man's good will is precious, 
like light, as long as he lives. Give the worst man, 
then, courage and hope; at least "save his face." 

All sorts of common experiences bring these 
things home to us. Who does not know what it is 
to relapse into childish moods? Who cannot say 
more or less mournfully, " I have been there," when 
we note moral disease in our neighbors, their petu- 
lance, their greediness, their pride, their hardness, 
severity, and unsympathy, passing so easily into 
cruelty and oppression, their tenacity of their own 



144 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

rights, becoming so often clear injustice ! There 
might well be hospitals for people with moral dis- 
eases in every township. Some friend should say to 
us on occasion: "Take a day off at 'the retreat.' 
You need it." Not one class alone called " crim- 
inal " needs this; most people need on occasion to 
be given a rest for a time from society. 

Pious souls once began the day in the posture of 
prayer; they went apart from time to time to seek 
the good spirit. Does not our modern religion call 
for something as wholesome as this? How can we 
best renew our spirits with the master thoughts of 
human life? Who does not need often to come 
back for companionship with the beautiful purpose 
which consecrates life? 

Can we overcome evil with good in all cases? 
Take the case of the Pharisee. This is the hardest 
problem we have. Pharisaism is a chronic disease 
of the soul. Can you touch it with denunciation? 
We wonder whether Jesus ever converted one Phar- 
isee into being his disciple. We wonder whether he 
tried. He took easier cases : he sought the lowly, 
the poor, the degraded, the obvious sinners. He 
never showed sympathy with the Pharisees, or ad- 
miration for their virtues. In his eyes and for his 
immediate purpose they stood in the way of his mis- 
sion. They and he became foes. They hardened 
their hearts against him. How could he reach any 
man without showing sympathy, understanding, 
good will? 



HOW TO HANDLE EVIL 145 

The time has come to leave no man out of the 
scope of our message. We must bring the Phari- 
sees to our side. We must learn to overcome their 
evil with good. We must build on the real good in 
them and so with their aid construct greater good. 
We must let them into our secret. We must bring 
our good will, not ill will, to their aid. Yes, to the 
worst man, as the best physician brings his skill to 
the most chronic cases. 

It follows that the one fault out of which all 
others grow is not to have a good will. I am help- 
less without this, as a man who has no power on in 
his shop or his car. Why am I not now as badly 
off as any wrong-doer? Have I ill will or enmity? 
Then I am on the level of all other sick souls. No 
man in ill will is fit for human society! You think 
the other party in the quarrel is to blame. What 
if you, with your harsh judgment and cruel will to 
make him suffer, may be the worse of the two? 
What are any of us but older or younger pupils in 
the vast school of life? No one ever did the other 
any good unless the light of a kindly humanity shone 
in his eyes. 

Or do you not, perhaps, wish to help the other? 
But you wish to be rid of him. Then indeed are 
you his enemy, as much as he is yours. Do you not 
both need to go to the hospital? What is your 
virtue, if you are unable to see any good in another 
and only wish him to die? What inhuman religion 
has so poisoned your soul? 

I hope that we have met the objection to our view 



146 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

of moral evil — that it is too gentle ; that we do not 
make sin serious enough; that we show complacency 
toward wrong-doers. This is the objection of the 
" good " or " pious," as against the " wicked " and 
godless. The pious in Jesus' day raised the same 
objection. He was easy with publicans and sinners; 
he shook hands with the vulgar and called ordinary 
fishermen into his society. But look! in the course 
of a few years there grew out of these timid, ordi- 
nary men a zeal for the pure life, a loyalty to prin- 
ciple, an ardent affection, an indomitable will that 
made martyrs. What can you do better than this 
with your precious punishments ! What do you ask 
more from any human soul than the fruits of the 
spirit — love, joy, patience, and all the rest of the 
triumphant list? No courses of discipline, no pur- 
gatorial restraint, no terror of hell can do what 
simple good will does to change men into friends 
and comrades. Indeed, if we ever must use re- 
straints and discipline, we shall only succeed in case 
our methods are surcharged with obvious good will. 

Once in a while the force that kills evil has been 
set in motion on a considerable scale. Francis of 
Assisi thus found the secret that the great church 
had forgotten. Where he went men forsook selfish 
ways and came together as friends. Humble groups 
from time to time carried a similar message through 
Europe; good priests told it and lived by it, but 
they never were able to cover the field of practical 
life or to make much impression on large popula- 



HOW TO HANDLE EVIL 147 

tions. The old barbarism dies hard. Not enough 
light and love had yet come. The old heresy that 
might and fear could alone keep the world in re- 
straint weighed on men's souls and played into the 
hands of priestcraft and tyranny. The Quakers re- 
newed the old message with astonishing results. 
Again men and women, once timid, took on a new 
will which nothing on earth could break down. 
They crowded the prisons with their heroic testi- 
mony against war and everything that turns men 
into enemies. But the old barbarism settled down 
still like a pall on the nations; men looked to the 
great churches and got no enlightenment. The her- 
esy of violence and punishment lay at the heart of 
what with grim humor they called a " gospel." It 
was the gospel of a hating and punishing God. 
Even Wesley carried two Gods in his Trinity, one 
who loved men, and another who sent them to hell. 
Is not the world ready to see that good will alone 
rules, that good will alone is almighty, that hate, 
contempt, enmity and the ill-will to punish slay hu- 
man life like a plague? Can we not see that what- 
ever treatment leaves men or nations in hatred leaves 
them worse and more dangerous? 

The fact is, the moment a human being releases 
his good will, the everlasting currents of the uni- 
verse are with him. This is no vague theory. Try 
it and see for yourself. It works miracles to trans- 
form evil to good. Not alone in early times but 
again and again in every age common men and 
women like Peter and James and Mary Magdalene 



148 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

have blossomed out into indomitable heroism. 
Men also of sensual habits, like Tolstoy, have been 
lifted to a new level. No one knows what hearty 
satisfaction life offers, till he learns to draw on 
the everlasting sources. To love is to live. Give 
the body fulness of health and you make it immune 
from disease. Fill a man's heart with good will 
and no evil can touch him. 



II 

THE NEW FORCE 

I have spoken of good will as if it were a new force 
just brought to light. There is a wonderful analogy 
here with the development of the electric energy. 
Of course electricity had always been playing about 
us in the world. Ages ago men had seen its curious 
action upon amber and other materials. They had 
observed it in certain fishes and eels. They had 
stood in awe of it in storms of thunder and light- 
ning. But it long went without a name and only 
within the memory of living men has it been fairly 
harnessed as a vast beneficent power to work for us 
and henceforth to conserve human labor. Even 
now we cannot pretend to know the mysterious 
helper; we only know it by what it does and its 
chameleon forms. But along with other forces 
playing together in human life, how mightily has it 
contributed to bring in a new era for mankind! 
New possibilities, new hopes, undreamed wealth, 
new economic conditions, a new freedom from the 
old restraints of poverty, mark the electrical age. 

So, only vastly more important, is the new spir- 
itual power. It has always shone in gleams; it has 
illuminated individual lives. Long ago it was 
known under the feeble name of meekness. Famous 

149 



ISO A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

conquerors won a greater fame by their magna- 
nimity and astonished their captives by making 
friends of them. Magnanimity is good will. 
Surely prophets taught it, but half accidentally. 
Simple men and women practiced it without knowing 
how wonderful it is. Jesus, a humble Galilean, has 
the supreme honor of bringing it fairly to light. 
Even yet the world waits painfully to see it come 
into general use. All sorts of forces, however, play 
together to mark its necessity; a new spirit must pre- 
vail in the world, adequate to match man's mastery 
of his newly acquired science and his tremendous 
physical inventions. No half-civilized peoples, such 
as those of our modern nations, can carry on the 
world any longer. 

Few students of religion, often curiously skepti- 
cal about the worth of their religion, have any idea 
yet of the revolution that will come in human de- 
velopment, when mankind understands what good 
will can do to change men's hearts and raise the tone 
and volume of the life-forces within us. New issues 
are coming to the front, new points of view, 
new motives, new ventures, a new freedom, new 
hopes for the millions, a new wealth of joy and hu- 
manity, such as never could have been before. Half 
the evil of the world has arisen from the poverty 
and the hopelessness of masses and races of men 
still close to the level of the animals around their 
huts or slums. When once, in addition to science, 
and in co-operation with its infinite resources of 
power and invention, linking together not continents 



THE NEW FORCE 15 1 

only but hamlet to hamlet, and household to house- 
hold over the earth, the unused spiritual power 
which makes men free and whole and friendly and 
happy shall really " pour itself out on all flesh," we 
shall behold a world worth hoping for, working for, 
living in, richer and better than poets ever saw in 
their visions. Who that looks back over the physi- 
cal and scientific progress from darkness to light in 
the last wonderful century, can doubt what man 
may do, provided he now re-aligns the science of 
manhood with his studies of matter and force ! 

We have barely begun to know a principle or law 
of nature when we have stated it. Behind always 
follow a troop of hitherto unseen implications and 
inferences. I wish in this chapter merely to sug- 
gest some of these new implications that lie just be- 
neath the surface of our spiritual science and bear 
on our practical life. In brief, I wish with the help 
of a new emphasis to show what the good will can 
do and how it acts. Its science is as practical as 
any other kind of knowledge. It works miracles 
also as science does, in the sense in which a miracle 
is a matter of wonder to the mind. A watch or an 
electric lantern is a wonder to a savage. An aero- 
plane is still a miracle. The greatest wonder in the 
universe is the turning of evil into good. The new 
worth and beauty created from the by-products of 
the crude petroleum is a parable of this. The good 
will likewise constructs beauty out of what we call 
evil. This is almost more wonderful than to create 
out of nothing, for it takes alien, ugly and odious 



152 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

material, counted worse than nothing, and trans- 
forms it into spiritual worth and value. 

We have seen that one of the illuminating names 
under which evil passes is limitation. Whatever 
hampers, throttles, starves life, is evil, as long as 
it lasts. Now the good will work to remove limi- 
tations. The good will is kindly power, acting with 
purpose; its purpose is construction, freedom of 
movement and growth, largeness of life. Wherever 
good will is at work this is the purpose. Every 
good man carries something of this purpose; it is 
the measure of his civilization. We cannot con- 
ceive that any less purpose than this exists and acts 
at the heart of the universe. Good will is the most 
constructive and beneficent name of God. There is 
hardly a more personal name, for we cannot con- 
ceive of impersonal purpose. 

Now, good will, removing limitations of all kinds, 
gives free circulation to the upbuilding life, as does 
the removal of abnormal pressure on a blood vessel. 
We mean by freedom our moral and social freedom. 
This freedom is actual, practicable, and verifiable. 
You want the freedom of the whole man, heart and 
soul and mind and will also, sharing in the nature 
of God. He does what he loves to do and loves to 
do what is best, and has satisfaction in it. To move 
and grow and use all your powers, as if infinite en- 
ergy were behind you, is substantial freedom. 
However you explain it, practically it is all that any 
one wants. The movement of good will in a man 
carries this sense of freedom. This is a matter of 



THE NEW FORCE 153 

fact and experience quite beyond the need of argu- 
ment. Life at its best is free, purposeful, effective 
motion. It can be balked but never defeated. Its 
nature is to turn obstacles to its own ends. 

What is the relation of the good will to the 
bodily health and the cure of disease? The history 
of religion has always had a curious connection with 
bodily states. The early Christianity came to many 
minds as a supernatural way to cure the sick. Every 
fresh renewal of religious life has brought with it 
stories of marvelous cure. In our own time we have 
seen Christian Science arise as a new health cult no 
less than a form of religion. Do not suppose that 
there is nothing whatever but delusion behind this 
fascinating side of religion? Let us use our intelli- 
gence not only to reject the irrational, but also to 
welcome whatever is hopefully true. 

Imagine the frequent case of the man, sick in 
body and mind, despondent, anxious, self-centred, 
brooding over his symptoms and growing worse. 
Bring him good news, a hope, a little courage, faith 
in himself and faith in God; show him in any way 
how to look out on the world at his best and to let 
a good will run in his nerves, — do you not see how 
this must have an effect upon the action of the body? 
Hopes, visions, truths, the renewal of will, do stir 
the circulation of the life of a man, and, as John 
Fiske has said, quicken " the rhythm of nutrition." 
The body only needs a wholesome tonic to raise the 
suffering system and put it in tune. The body is 
a vital engine, bearing with it a child of the in- 



154 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

finite spirit. There is no tonic so energetic as the 
buoyant and friendly good will. When the sick 
man says, like the soldier in battle, u I will die if I 
must, but I have a work to do, and, please God, I 
will do my best for it," he is adding the tonic health 
of his spirit to set the body free of disease. A 
myriad witnesses vouch that this is so. You never 
know when some spiritual tonic may not reach and 
renew the ebbing tide of life. 

The same principle applies, even in the case of the 
aged, or with hopeless illness. Evidently no kind 
of medicine can always hold death at bay. But 
there is no age limit to the growth of the affections, 
of the faith, of the will, engaged to do a man's part 
as long as life lasts. There is no limit to the satis- 
faction of a mind at peace within and fearless of 
evil. The body fails, but the man, sustained by the 
inner and undying life of the spirit, keeps his face 
to the front. The flow of good will is still a liber- 
ating force. 

Every step upward in the normal growth of a 
child is the working of the good will, casting off 
shackles and hindrances to achieve freedom. Noth- 
ing can be called education that does not relieve 
the mind of its childish limitations. The child starts 
in bondage to prejudices, to traditions, to a narrow 
patriotism, to hurtful habits, to an egotistic will. 
He is apt to see freedom where it cannot be. He 
desires to do as he pleases, as if the entanglement 
of a load of petty and frivolous personal indulgen- 
ces were freedom ! He sees in school and work, in 



THE NEW FORCE 155 

rules and laws, in social duties and obligations, a 
world of restraints. Restraints these will be, if he 
fails to see what they mean, and undertakes them 
as a slave or a hireling. But give him the liberating 
sense of their manifold uses and his own part as a 
sharer in them, let him accept them, as they come, 
with a good social will, and presently he becomes a 
master of life. Duties and obligations, to obey 
regulations, to keep promises, to pay one's debts, to 
render his full tale of work, become so many means 
to fulfill the co-operative enterprises of a friendly 
household, of a kindly neighborhod, of a just city 
or State, of a comradeship of all peoples. Every 
selfish indulgence cripples, but the motion of a good 
will enfranchises. 

As the life of the body depends upon the free 
circulation, with which disease interferes, so the life 
of human society depends upon free circulation, 
through utterance, expression, sympathy, good will, 
between its individual members. It is not the worst 
mischief in a moral ailment that it spoils or checks 
the growth of the man himself; the man's ailment 
reacts upon society around him, and breaks its free 
circulation. Good society, that is, civilization, 
wants individuals sound through and through. 
There cannot be anywhere a single atom, cut off in 
its free flow from the rest, or infecting the others 
with its own selfish malady, without a continual loss 
and privation that may be felt on the other side of 
the earth. There are those who ceaselessly con- 
tribute, hardly conscious of the fact themselves, to 



156 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

the happy, normal circulation of " give and take," of 
easy healthful intercourse and companionship, which 
bind the parts of the social body into amity and 
power. This is the gift of the " man of the world " 
in the best sense of the term. He is one to whom it 
is truly said, " All things are yours." He acquires 
the character of the citizen of the universe, who 
finds himself everywhere at home. It is open to 
any one to acquire this social gift; it only depends 
upon the volume and quality of the humanity or 
good will that has free flow through him and out- 
ward to all men. What material contribution that 
man can make for his fellows is so great or needful 
as this quickening of the circulating life of the spirit? 
Where plenty of good will flows you do not have 
to stand off and fight social diseases with violence. 
The active good will dissolves evil as the strong 
wind sweeps over the continent and disperses the 
storms. Take the list of the master evils of hu- 
man society — pride, hate, anger, covetousness, 
envy, fear, jealousy. The very names call up im- 
ages of gloomy walls, custom houses, forts, locked 
doors, secret stairs, isolation, loneliness, anxious, 
worried faces, frightened populations, blazing in- 
surrection and mob violence. Such things happen 
whenever the stream of normal intercourse, arising 
out of cheerful and trusting good will, is cut off be- 
tween the members of society, between nations, be- 
tween classes, between the brain workers and the 
hand workers, between teachers and their youth, be- 
tween neighbors in the tiniest village. Every or- 



THE NEW FORCE 157 

ganization or form of society that proves to hamper 
this full and free circulation of friendly life must 
disappear. 

Men who ought to know better, even university 
men, are so foolish as to try to make excuses for 
themselves in behalf of their pride or anger or im- 
patience or distrust or jealousy. Our indignation 
is just, they say. The others do not deserve to be 
trusted. The multitude are too ignorant to be re- 
spected. The only language which certain people 
understand is brute force. " The only good Indian 
is a dead Indian." Our laborers are always unrea- 
sonable. The democracy is not fit to rule. Such 
things as these may be heard every day in clubs and 
Pullman cars and parlors. They are never said 
with friendly faces; they are not said out of open 
minds. Doubtless they can be matched, perhaps 
with rougher phrases, but hardly with more bitter 
tones, by angry men at lunch counters or in meetings 
at street corners. 

Men talk of checking and restraining social mala- 
dies by force of laws and closer public regulations, 
as they talk of keeping the peace of the world by 
an armed League, " policing the seas " with war- 
ships. As if you could fight an evil spirit with gun- 
powder! As if you could overcome pride by vio- 
lence; as if you could compel social health by cre- 
ating new fear! 

The social maladies are all one malady, and that 
malady is negative rather than real and positive. 
It arises out of the want of sound social life — 



158 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

the stoppage of the circulation of the normal life 
of good will. Stupid society has made a fashion of 
doubt, of suspicion, of distrust. Change the bad 
fashion for a better. Make a habit of a kindly 
manner, of courage, of cheerfulness, of apprecia- 
tion of the good to be found in the world. Was 
ever anything gained by discovering and retailing 
evil? Watch the effect. Wherever good will is at 
work, the demons of the darkness disappear. The 
good will liberates our souls and lets us out into the 
open. Live in good will, and you have entered a 
mighty alliance, with the universe on your side. 
Friends rise up everywhere to greet you. Locked 
doors are thrown open. What if you have fewer 
dollars to your credit on the assessor's books, pro- 
vided you can look any man in the world in the face, 
as one who holds and seeks nothing with covetous 
eyes! 

I urge nothing that is not upheld by the facts. 
Skillful administrators who have tried what good 
will does with wild tribes on the prairies or with 
savage Moros, explorers who have threaded their 
way through the desert, a new school of pioneers 
in industrial democracy, a gallant group of success- 
ful experimenters with human nature in city police 
courts and with prisons, a host of modern teachers 
and parents, are ready to give their overwhelming 
testimony to the power of good will, as the social 
life force to cure and dissolve the evil in men. 
Everything else fails, because everything else acts 
like a drug to create ailment, not to cure it. The 



THE NEW FORCE 159 

good will brings free circulation of spiritual life, and 
every one can do something to make this free life- 
flow prevail. Helping to free and heal society, he 
frees and saves himself. 

I trust that I have made my point clear, that the 
good will is no more our own creation than is the 
electric energy. We learn to turn it on and use it. 
It is one of the " powers not ourselves," as righteous- 
ness is, as beauty is. The gift of God — we use it 
as we use life itself. No pride or egotism, but a 
restful and inspiring satisfaction grows out of this 
fact. It is indeed a sort of witness of the presence 
of God. 



Ill 

THE HERESIES THAT HURT MEN 

The only dreadful heresies are such as undermine 
our humanity and our spiritual life. They are not 
mere differences of opinion: they touch human con- 
duct, and they are apt to be extremely popular and 
even u fashionable." 

Every fresh generation of mankind inherits, and 
is obliged to carry upon its back, a considerable 
load of the ideas and prejudices of its forefathers. 
No one knows how much of himself, so far from 
being his own self, is the transmission of a long line 
of more or less barbarous ancestors. The worst 
errors thus come to us from a time when man was 
hardly conscious of possessing a spiritual nature. 
We put aside the so-called theological heresies. 
Did the holding of any of them, about " the Trin- 
ity," for instance, tend to make a man worse — 
cruel or untruthful or dishonorable? Let me name 
certain errors which do have the effect of lowering 
our humanity and making men worse. We might 
call them the unsocial heresies, because they alienate 
men from each other and create enmity. 

One set of these heresies concerns men's thought 
of what life is. Thus, men think that success in life 
consists in getting all that we can. They mean get- 

160 



THE HERESIES THAT HURT MEN 161 

ting things, money and what money will buy. They 
say that " every man has his price/' and that " a 
man will give all that he hath for his life." They 
mean that men are essentially selfish. When they 
say these things they are thinking of the animal or 
physical man, who is not really a man. What they 
say is not true of a real and whole man. It is 
hardly true of a dog. We are poor indeed if we 
do not know men who are beyond being bought at 
any price. President Wilson has been affirming 
that our nation went to war for its ideals ! If this 
is ten per cent, true, it confutes the heresy that life 
consists in the things that you can get, and that men 
are altogether selfish. 

Another group of heresies touches men's ideas 
about force. It is the fashion to say that what 
wins, and always must win in the end, is superior 
physical or mechanical force. War is nothing more 
or less than the appeal to this force. The tinge 
of international lawi in it in no wise changes its 
character. It is said that all government, from 
that of the home to a League of Nations, rests at 
last on superior force. Every election in a democ- 
racy is thus an appeal to the strength of greater 
numbers, or the greater wealth that controls num- 
bers. It is claimed that civilization would go to 
wreck unless the civilized nations held force enough 
to overpower one another ! 

The error here starts from a false idea about man 
and the nature of his humanness. On our physical 
side, compared with the animals, we are pitifully 



162 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

feeble. But our intelligence, a purely spiritual fac- 
ulty, sets us at the head of creation. As soon as 
the man steps forth a full man, the spiritual powers 
in him, mind, idealism, faith, loyalty, sympathy, con- 
stitute his distinction from the animal. All the 
powers of the universe culminate in the man of good 
will, heart, soul, mind, strength, vision, love, acting 
together. This is not the force that men talk about 
when they say that government and civilization 
rest upon force. The force that constitutes a civil- 
ized man is spirit, or will, akin to the force that 
rules the universe. Let a man once assimilate this 
fact and he will never again think that the ordeal 
of battle, long since rejected in every decent relation 
between men, is nevertheless needed to support the 
cause of civilization! In fact the glorious history 
of civilization is the process by which every imperial- 
istic scheme that rests upon mere might goes to de- 
struction, and " the weak things of the world " prove 
to be those chosen to " confound the things which 
are mighty. " 

The worst of the heresies about force are those 
which men practice under the head of government, 
and even of popular government, in their treatment 
of one another, and especially of the weaker mem- 
bers of society and of backward peoples. The great 
war was a revelation of the subtle and poisonous 
working of the old idea that " might makes right." 
When the war-lords say this, the " free nations " 
hate it. But what do the same free nations say? 
They say, " Necessity knows no law." Do the Ger- 



THE HERESIES THAT HURT MEN 163 

mans use cruel or immoral means? The Allies pres- 
ently use the same means. They thus justify their 
enemies, who held that their cause was right — yes, 
necessary " for the good of the world " ! Distin- 
guished Germans have said this. In the eyes of the 
Germans the Allied Nations, starving them to death, 
looked much the same as Bolshevists presently 
looked to the Allies. 

The Allies professed to carry on war for human- 
ity, and to save civilization, as if they possessed it 
themselves ! They proceeded to assume arbitrary 
power; they stamped out free discussion; they en- 
forced their will, exactly as a tyrant does, upon those 
who did not believe in the righteousness of their 
superior force; their greater numbers, their physical 
necessity made new crimes; they secured authority 
for universal conscription and snatched free men, 
much as in the days of the press-gang, away from 
their work and their homes and compelled them to 
go over seas to kill men like themselves, knowing 
as little as they did what the war was about; they 
exercised tortures to break the wills of those whose 
respect for humanity forbade them to put men to 
death; they filled their jails with political prisoners, 
men or women. Was not this to say what Germany 
had said, that might is right, that necessity knows 
no law, that the Government is absolute over the 
individual — the same old heresy, pleasing to mon- 
archs in the time of our forefathers, whose repudia- 
tion of it drove them here into exile? 

Great good may come out of all this mischief. 



1 64 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

What if it serves to awaken the world to see and put 
away our current system of punishments and to re- 
form our criminal law ! What is punishment, in the 
usual sense of the word, but another form of the 
heresy about the righteousness of power and might 
and necessity? The father, the teacher, the judge, 
the court martial, or the State, having power, has 
therefore the right to punish disobedient subjects, a 
child, a citizen, or a stranger. Does this right come 
down from heaven? Who has the right to vest it 
in a king? Does a majority of voters possess it? 
What is this action of punishment? It is designed 
to inflict suffering and disgrace; it may be, to isolate 
the victim from the society of mankind; in most 
States, it goes so far on occasion as to take the life 
of the victim. Is this to do anything humanly use- 
ful? Is it to insure the making of better members 
of society? On the contrary, it is generally ad- 
mitted to result in often irremediable injury to the 
individual and therefore to the body of society. 

It is supposed that this right to inflict punish- 
ment upon a brother man is the right of the superior 
over an assumed inferior. The parent is older or 
wiser. The teacher or the judge derives his right 
from the State ; but the State is only a name for all 
of us, the citizens, acting so far as we may in the 
interest of all. What then if punishment proves no 
longer to be in the common interest? Who are we, 
fellow citizens, to assume in our corporate capacity 
a superior station as the more civilized and righteous, 



THE HERESIES THAT HURT MEN 1 65 

and to condemn the disobedient as wicked inferiors? 
The story of Jesus and the woman taken in adultery 
holds the human nature of such cases in a nutshell. 
Who am I, the parent, that I should take upon me 
to hurt, to strike, to humiliate, to excommunicate my 
child in order to satisfy my grown-up sense of his 
offense and his deserts? The one thing to do, if I 
love the child and hold his spiritual nature precious, 
is to help bring him back into the family fellowship. 
Has he disgraced himself? This is for him to dis- 
cover; it is for me to help him find it out. Does he 
need treatment designed to re-enforce a better will? 
This is for us together to work out, as if he were 
sick, requiring special diet or medicine or temporary 
restraint. As we parents consider the nature of 
the child, its weaknesses, its limitations, its eager 
appetites and desires, and then also its priceless 
capacities, its dormant spiritual possibilities, the 
manhood or womanhood that is yet to bud forth, 
why does not such a vision of the reality and sacred- 
ness of life possess our souls as to make it impossible 
for us to deal out punishment to him? x 

The way of escape from our barbarous heresies 

1 Of course we recognize that a very young child, before the 
intelligence and the conscience have awakened, dwells in the ani- 
mal world and not yet in the human. Even so, we know no better 
method in our treatment than the application of the Golden Rule. 
How should we wish to be treated, guided and restrained, putting 
ourselves in the young child's place? The wise and tender mother 
actually follows this rule. She never forgets that the little child 
is on his way up to heirship in the same spiritual life with her- 
self and with the heroes and masters. Her opportunity is to de- 
liver him as soon as may be into that self-determination which be- 
longs of right to men and nations. 



1 66 , A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

about men and nations is the same as in the case of 
our children. It is to see ourselves somewhat as 
others see us; it is to think of others as we like to 
have them think of us ; it is to respect men as human 
like ourselves; it is to treat them always as men; it 
is to expect their best and so to help them to realize 
their best. Here is the saving truth to alter our 
entire system of criminal jurisprudence, to put away 
all thought of " enforcing " justice or peace, or of 
giving men " their deserts," and to fill our souls with 
a wholesome pity for the wayward, abnormal and 
feeble-minded people whom we have either neglected 
or thrust into prison. As for punishing whole 
nations, God send the dull world prophets of truth 
to show us that the laying of penalties on a sister 
nation, the seeking to disgrace and humble it, the 
blackening its character and u ringing it around " 
with distrust and enmity, only inflames the same 
worse side in ourselves that we deem so hateful in 
others ! We are all pretty much the same, Jews 
and Gentiles, Christians and Buddhists, blacks or 
whites, when wte put our humanity away from us. 

Let us pay our respects next to certain familiar 
heresies which linger in the murky realm of casuistry 
and have great staying power. The most common 
of these is that we may " do evil that good may 
come." I state this rather too baldly. Satan does 
not generally come so openly as he appears in the 
story of Jesus' temptations. What chance would 
the enemy have to get into the citadel if he came in 



THE HERESIES THAT HURT MEN 1 67 

war paint? The tiny modicum of evil is well sugar- 
coated for us. The idea is, that provided we do a 
very small evil we shall draw a great prize of good. 
Thus, as the story went, Jesus should have all the 
kingdoms of the earth for one little act of untruth. 
What good he then could do ! Why should he set 
up the barrier of his conscience against such a quick 
way of saving all mankind? Did he not in fact 
make a mistake in his choice? With Satan's way 
open for him, he could have had the armies of the 
world to make and enforce peace ! What harm was 
there in making your best bow just once to Satan? 
The tempter appealed to our spiritual chivalry; let 
your soul go to damnation, he said, to win the war 
for democracy. Be false that truth may prevail; 
do injustice that justice may triumph; kill that the 
world may learn how to forgive ! 

Try now another quite plausible form of our 
maxim, thus: " The end justifies the means." We 
call this the Doctrine of Expediency. When we 
used to be told that the Jesuits taught this, we 
hated it. But is it not exactly what all Christendom 
has been doing? To accomplish a certain end — the 
saving of our precious civilization — we took a hor- 
rible means. Why then were not the Jesuits right? 
The end justified the means; therefore men were 
forced to fight, and pacifists who protested against 
the means must be rigorously punished. Submarine 
warfare and the bombing of cities were wrong, but 
when the enemy thought his end justified the means, 
we too took up the same acts and the same excuses. 



1 68 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

How plausible it all was ! Yes, without a certain 
guiding principle, it was inevitable. 

This introduces us to another of the errors that 
hurt men; namely: Between two evils choose the 
lesser. Certainly, we all say, if we are dealing with 
things. If it is a question of losing one's limbs or 
losing one's life, one submits to an operation. Even 
so the choice is apt to be made in the dark! What 
do we know as to which of various evils is the least? 
In the realm of the spirit, however, in all matters 
touching our humanity, no such rule exists. Face 
the issue squarely ! What is evil in the moral, social, 
spiritual conduct? It is whatever hurts our human- 
ity, whatever lowers the standard of truth, justice, 
or mercy in ourselves or in others, whatever lessens 
the good will. The rule here is to do no evil. To 
do evil in the realm of our humanity is to give and 
take poison. There is nothing commensurate be- 
tween losing money or losing a limb or suffering 
pain, and losing spiritual life, in becoming a worse 
man, in assisting others to become worse rather than 
better. You tell me, that between the little false- 
hood and the loss of my salary and the suffering of 
my family, I should choose the former. I answer 
that I do the worse wrong even to my family if I 
fail to play the part of a man. What do I know 
about the consequences of losing my salary, or 
whether the loss will really be evil? I do know 
that the falsehood will do spiritual harm for every 
one with whom I am set to make this a better world. 
Shall I think so ill of my wife and children as to 



THE HERESIES THAT HURT MEN 1 69 

suppose that they will thank me for doing a wrong? 
But how is it when you have to choose between a 
bad candidate of your own party — the good party 
— and a respectable candidate of the bad party? 
Who can tell me which will be the worse choice? 
I shall do evil in either case. If I encourage an 
unfit candidate to " bank on " the regular vote of 
his reputable party, I shall do evil. I shall do the 
same kind of evil, if I encourage an unscrupulous 
party to expect to purchase votes by putting up re- 
spectable candidates. Why must I choose at all in 
this case, and not rather protest, so far as I can, 
against political methods which debase our politics 
and defeat the interests of the people? Are we not 
set here, as if by the Captain of our souls, to stand 
true to our convictions in every issue? Does not 
this mean never knowingly to go with the multitude 
to do any evil, least of all to gamble with evil 
choices, as if we could ever foretell their issue ! 
Why is the little rivet placed in the structure of the 
bridge except to hold firm? 

What shall we say now to those who are always 
telling us that our principles are excellent but that 
" the time is not ripe for them "? They admit that 
the world needs the Golden Rule more than any- 
thing else; but they go on to remark that the world 
doubtless is not ready for it. They hate war, they 
insist, as much as any one, but is not war still some- 
times necessary? Wait, they say, till we have made 
the world safe for the idealists to live in! Wait, 



1 70 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

before you use your principles, till all have adopted 
them. Perhaps this is the most demoralizing and 
popular of all the heresies that the world listens to. 
You will find it dozing away in all the comfortable 
chairs of the palaces, the counting houses, the gov- 
ernment offices, the pews, and the pulpits. What 
does it mean? It means that men do not practically 
take this to be a spiritual universe: that they do not 
realize themselves as spiritual, human, social beings; 
that they have no profound convictions; that they 
do not believe in reality. It works out to mean 
falsity-, dishonor, cowardice, the betrayal on week- 
days of the very ideals which men enthrone on Sun- 
days. What can they do more damaging than to 
say in effect that the Golden Rule will not work? 
Why teach it in the Sunday School then? If men 
and women cannot make it work, who were brought 
up to recite and profess it, who can make it work? 
Have they honestly tried to make it work? In what 
new field of human interest or sympathy have they 
ever practiced with it and found it to fail? Has it 
ever failed in the family? In their friendships? 
Where has it ever failed in business, in treating 
workmen, in solving social questions? Has not each 
slight approach toward it. even in dealing with 
nations, brought in a harvest of thankfulness? 

Men say. We will be honest when the others are 
honest: we will tell the truth when all tell the truth: 
we will stop war when the wicked nations stop. 
How mean! How disgraceful! Do you wish the 
others to be honest, to tell the truth, to put an end 



THE HERESIES THAT HURT MEN 171 

to fighting? Why then do not you, the superior 
people, the more highly civilized, the more u Chris- 
tian," yourselves do those things which you wish 
to see prevail? How else will they prevail? How 
do you know that you are superior to others? How 
can you know, unless you use your strength, your 
intelligence, your conscience, your will? Why not 
try out your principles and see how splendid they 
are? 

" Let us be practical," men reply, as if there were 
two worlds, one practical and the other ideal, and 
two kinds of men accordingly! Are these practical 
men happy with their practical world? Have they 
shown any superior wisdom with their old saws 
about the "safe" and "expedient"? Why, this 
material world thrusts them all aside, and is ready 
almost to worship a man, who from the high pulpit 
of a great office has been preaching a few ideals — 
what ought to be — about a possible civilized world- 
order. Would to God that this man's admirable 
mind had not already been filled so long with the 
old-world heresies as to take away his capacity to do 
what he preached! Alas, he too had taken the 
magic " dope," that " the time was not ripe " to " do 
justice, to show mercy, to walk humbly before God " ! 

'What would you have done?" men reply. 
I' Was not war inevitable for us, when once the Ger- 
mans had sunk our ships? " But the great war did 
not begin with the Germans. It had many begin- 
nings. It began for us when the United States 
fought a needless war with Spain, It was Karma 



172 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

when we took upon ourselves the role of an imperial- 
ist State in the Philippine Islands; it was accumu- 
lated destiny with every new battleship that we built. 
These things were preparations for war, not for the 
peace of the world. They each and all set up vibra- 
tions in the minds of every German militarist and 
lowered the moral tone of every one who had ac- 
cepted their supposed necessity. How else could 
they work but in the way of distrust, fear, suspicion, 
inhumanity? Not thus are made the approaches of 
peace. Peace is costly; it means sympathy, gener- 
osity, modesty; it knows how to forgive; above all 
things it means good will toward all men, with the 
emphasis of reality on both the will and the good. 
The peace which the world needs approaches with 
each fresh soul who forsakes the ways of selfishness, 
whether personal or national, and chooses the way 
of the civilized man. 

We need now to clear from our minds a whole 
cluster of heathen falsehoods as, for example, that 
goodness is feeble and evil is strong; that ideals are 
dreams, and gold, corn, and barrels of flour are real- 
ities; that human nature is a poor, feeble thing at 
best and you never can change it. People seem to 
themselves very wise in repeating these old saws 
as if they were original. Did we not admit that all 
the heresies that hurt men are fashionable? You 
can cite plausible facts to support them ! Pray cite 
all the facts that you wish. Please then exercise the 
slenderest intelligence upon the direct question: 
What is the truth? 



THE HERESIES THAT HURT MEN 173 

Is goodness feeble? It is the toughest substance 
in the universe, guaranteed by the Almighty. Men 
have thought they were trampling upon it, breaking 
down its will, torturing and crucifying it. But they 
never could kill it; if they seemed to defeat it in 
one place, presently it shone out somewhere else. 
Goodness is integrity, it is order, wholeness, health. 
Why should it not be strong? Men thought that 
they must uphold civilization and defend it from the 
barbarians. How? By sacrificing the principles of 
civilized men and taking the methods of the savage ! 
They based their civilization, like all the Kaisers, 
upon having the heavier battalions. Cannot men see 
that every beautiful virtue which makes life dear 
and builds up order in the earth, has been achieved 
in the teeth of a prevailing animalism, stupidity, hate 
and savagery, simply because order, law, fidelity, 
truth, good will are invincible? You cannot defend 
these eternal things with machine guns. You can 
only give your souls to obey them. 

What are these ideals which men still daily set 
over in supposed opposition to their precious, huge 
and heavy practicalities? There is no opposition. 
The ideal is everywhere simply the plan, or thought- 
side of the things you wish to make. The better 
the thing — a house, a picture, a temple, a city, a 
friendship, a commonwealth, a civilized world — the 
better, nobler, more complex must the plan or ideal 
be. What good thing do you seek to do, purpose- 
lessly, without any plan? What greater joy has 
the constructive mind of man than to create good 



174 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

plans for good things and then to go forth and 
make the plan real? This is to share in the work 
of the supreme Intelligence. What possible work 
of man is so practical as to have both an eye to see, 
and a hand to make real, that vision or ideal or 
plan which we call the " Kingdom of God "? We 
mean a humane and civilized world, good to live in 
throughout every corner and island of it. I see 
nothing weak about this, or in the men and women 
who will bring it to pass. 

We do not wish to change human nature. We 
are well enough suited with it at its best. We like 
the children with all their faults. We like grown- 
up people, despite their faults. We are not satisfied 
with the children or their elders. We are distressed 
whenever the brute grows while the man does not 
grow. But we maintain that men and women and 
children have in them that which is divine and eter- 
nal. When this better nature gleams out, as it does 
at times gleam from the darkest corners, we are glad 
and happy. By virtue of this we can believe in 
the men yet to come. Let the good spirit play like 
the sunshine upon men, let men from childhood up- 
ward have the conditions and the opportunity to 
grow freely as men, and no one will complain any 
longer that we must change human nature. It will 
be good enough when the human nature in all of us 
grows, matures, ripens, as it has already many a 
time grown and borne fruit. 



SECTION IV 
THE NEW CIVILIZATION 

I 

RELIGION AND INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY 

In arraigning the current religion for its compara- 
tive impotence, we showed that it does not half be- 
lieve its own doctrines. It is supposed to teach the 
idea of a living God, a real and spiritual universe, to 
which we belong. It teaches in words the idea of a 
brotherhood of mankind. But it does not believe 
that it is safe to behave as citizens of this spiritual 
universe or to trust men to answer to our friendly 
treatment. Now in religion to half believe is not 
to believe ; it is to mix atheism with religion. It is 
to defer the operation of your religion beyond this 
present life, while you carry on life here as if this 
world were no part of the universe. 

We wish to show at every step that the proof of 
veritable religion lies in its use and application. 
There is no little spot in the region of human con- 
duct where our religion does not throw a new light, 
add a new and greater power, and introduce fresh 
motives and hopes. The good will is at once a force 
and a solvent for all human problems. Let us 

i75 



176 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

boldly try what it will do in the vexed field of Indus- 
trial Democracy. I use this term in its largest sense. 
Is there anything in the science of political economy 
which it does not cover ? No wonder the economists 
have often been dry and dull with their investigations 
of the economic man — as if there ever were such a 
being! It is as preposterous to make an abstract 
or non-human subject of political economy as it is to 
leave the vital human realities out of the science of 
government. 

We mean by Industrial Democracy whatever con- 
cerns the welfare of man as a whole man, not merely 
as buying, selling, trading, working, serving, or 
handling money; we mean the man who is contented 
or suffers injustice, who aspires to larger means and 
opportunity, who is thwarted, stunted, and enfeebled, 
who is bound up in all sorts of relations with the 
family, with friends, with clubs, labor unions, and 
associations, with the State, the nation, and the aims 
of political parties, with the methods of taxation, 
with the interests of toiling, despoiled, starving, op- 
pressed industrial comrades in every part of the 
world, with helpless, ignorant, and idle peoples also 
and backward races. Thus, whatever is human be- 
comes precious to the religious-minded and demo- 
cratic student of political economy, whether he has a 
great library at his command or is only the humble 
reader of a labor paper. His wish is more than to 
know facts; he also desires to sift the facts with one 
major end; namely, to see how better to lift the level 
of life for all men; not the physical life alone, 



RELIGION AND INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY 177 

through better wages and outward conditions, but 
the spiritual life also, in which man is a candidate 
for new reaches of free, artistic, aesthetic, affectional 
expression. We want to learn how every one can 
be set upon the path of happy social experience ; we 
want every one to have the normal rewards of his 
greatest usefulness; we want human conservation. 

The scope of human interests is amazingly wide 
and complex; it is unlikely that we can tell in advance 
how any theory or scheme will work in its ultimate 
effect. We must cheerfully try social and political 
experiments; we must be hospitable to new proposals 
as well as conservative in keeping whatever values 
we have already obtained. Do we want socialism, 
for example? No one yet can possibly tell us what 
socialism will be and what it will do ? Let us not be 
afraid to take such steps toward it as are obviously 
just. To do justice must surely be safe. Mean- 
while, no ideal system, whether of government or 
of industry, can succeed without men and women 
who are themselves sufficiently civilized and social- 
ized to fit it and to make it work. Every step we 
take together toward our ideal system of human 
co-operation must evidently react upon the men and 
women who share in it, making them either more or 
less worthy to enjoy a full and richer life. W T ho 
would desire socialism if our experiments in it indi- 
cate a general weakening of the energy, the inde- 
pendence, the originality, the nerve, the joy of the 
people ? These qualities are the spiritual tests of full- 
ness of life. Could we be content with any scheme 



178 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

that divided the largest volumes of material ever 
known among the biggest populations, if this well- 
fed multitude lacked integrity, faith, hopefulness, 
sympathy; if they had no virile religion? 

I make bold to say that there is nothing except 
the new force of good will with which we can address 
ourselves to the tangle of labyrinthine problems that 
lie now before the march of mankind. Hopelessly 
dark without this, with this they become almost 
easy. Several simple propositions seem to prove it. 

First, we have a right to believe that average men, 
and not merely an exceptional few, are susceptible to 
ideal doctrines. In other words, they are readier 
for them than the people of superior education 
imagine. Take, for example, that principle which 
lies at the foundation of all industrial justice : " We 
desire only that which is fair, or what belongs to 
us." This is the heart of that most remarkable 
and spiritual of the Ten Commandments. Thou 
shalt not covet anything that belongs to thy neigh- 
bor — which far surpasses the rule not to steal. It 
says : Do not wish to steal. I believe the average 
mind responds to this. If we only had imagination 
enough to see its implications we should hardly need 
any other rule of conduct in industry or business. 
Industrial Democracy rests upon the general good 
will in the hearts of men to wish for nothing that be- 
longs to another. 

The trouble now is that we see only the surface of 
this rule. We think of the items mentioned in the 
text, the neighbor's house, his furniture, his animals, 



RELIGION AND INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY 179 

his money, the things in sight. We think of the 
things that he has already got and which are inven- 
toried under his name. It does not occur to us to 
ask about the things which ought to belong to a man, 
which he has not yet received. Probably most slave- 
holders " did not think," as children say, that they 
were stealing the slaves' lives. They saw the slave 
as one who possessed nothing, and flattered them- 
selves for their kindness if they gave him his living ! 
How about any class of industrial workers, such for 
instance as unskilled railroad workers, who, as has 
been commonly admitted, have been paid insuffi- 
ciently? In other words, wages have been with- 
held from those who ought to have had them. 
Why? The directors and superintendents of the 
roads would have been shocked if any one had 
charged them with theft. But whether with or 
without fraudulent intent their conduct has resulted 
in theft. They have systematically taken from the 
total earnings of their roads what belonged to, and 
ought to have been distributed among, hundreds of 
thousands of men. They have perhaps said to 
themselves what slaveholders said: We pay the 
standard rates for this class of men. To-day the 
question presses more closely : Do you wish and mean 
to keep back for your dividends what by right is 
due to these workers? The same question begins 
to push back to all stockholders' meetings. Do you 
wish dividends, part of which belong to your em- 
ployees? No honest and well-disposed men or 
women can meet this question save with one answer : 



180 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

Tell us what will be fair and right! We wish to 
take no dividends at other men's expense. 

This is no one-sided issue. The workingman, no 
less than the employing class, needs to have his ideal- 
istic imagination awakened. Most likely you will 
reach his intelligence sooner than that of the wealth- 
ier men. He does not wish more than is his. 
Every one would say this. But suppose that being 
discontended with his wages or the length of his 
working day, he seeks to " get even " with his em- 
ployer by some process of slacking or sabotage? 
How does any one who takes his case into his own 
hands either by force or trickery, know that he will 
get only what he tries for, and not an advantage 
over the other; that is, more than belongs to him? 
Why should I stoop from my manhood and become 
dishonest because I think another man is worse than 
I am? If I do this, it is because I have lost my 
integrity, my good will, my good humor. I am not 
at my best, and am ready therefore to commit injus- 
tice. 

The vexed question of privilege comes in here. 
The world has so long been used to the fact of priv- 
ilege that its beneficiaries and its victims also have 
accepted it as a normal institution, without asking 
what honest basis it ever had. I mean by privilege 
all such special favors, advantages, and exemptions 
allowed or taken by certain people or classes at the 
cost, the loss, or the disadvantage of the rest of the 
people. A teacher has a favorite pupil to whom 
she gives more attention than she is able to give to 



RELIGION AND INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY l8l 

the others; a nation favors families who possess 
the richest and largest lands, and seats in Parliament; 
a Governor or President is permitted to nominate 
his friends or relatives for lucrative offices; a class 
of manufacturers is given power to adjust taxes for 
their own benefit; a group of shrewd men is 
granted a monopoly of timber land, of copper mines, 
of water-power; a millionaire is allowed to endow 
a family who can live upon the public perhaps for a 
hundred years. Who would not like, thinking only 
of the selfish side of it, to enjoy such special ad- 
vantage in the struggle of life ! We are all now 
being disillusionized, or rather our idealistic imagina- 
tion is being quickened, about the meaning of priv- 
ilege. As no right-thinking child likes to be a 
teacher's favorite, as no manly boy wishes to win 
the game by the favor of the umpire, so men are 
opening their eyes and refusing economic or political 
favors and privileges which carry the taint of injury 
to their fellows. Who am I to covet what may be 
felt somewhere in the great social body as so much 
impoverishment ! The Industrial Democracy, in 
denying special privileges, open to some but not open 
to all, is thus enlarging the opportunities for all man- 
kind, and not least of all for those who in accepting 
the old-time privileges of class and heredity are now 
seen to have suffered exposure to special and ugly 
perils to their character and their honor. 

Another excellent foundation stone underneath In- 
dustrial Democracy is the will to pay our way in the 
world. This is the more positive aspect of our will 



1 82 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

to have nothing that rightly belongs to others. We 
want more than merely to keep within our rights. 
The idealistic imagination in us is certainly caught 
with the constructive idea of doing our part in the 
world's cost, toil, struggle, sacrifice, and even suffer- 
ing. Do we want to be exempt from that which 
belongs to the work of mankind? We need to see 
that it is given to every man and market to hasten 
" the good day coming." 

Look at it in this way. You and I cost a good 
deal of money in the course of an education and 
before we ever earn a dollar. We cost money every 
day as long as we live. The money is merely the 
method of keeping accounts. If our parents pay it, 
or the city, the ultimate terms of the cost are in 
human labor and rarely our own. The question is : 
Do we ever make good for our cost? Is it worth 
while that we should have lived, so far as those 
are concerned who have hoed the corn, reaped the 
wheat, woven the cloth, cooked the food, and pro- 
vided our happy surroundings? Evidently, the 
more I use and the more I enjoy, the more am I 
bound in honor to make an equivalent in some kind 
of human service. To pay my bills honorably is the 
least part of it. What can I say of the means 
through which my income reaches me? Is it hon- 
estly earned? That is, does the way in which my 
parents or I got my money do any good? No man 
has any right to die happy, unless he may hope that 
it has been well worth while to the great toiling 
world to have boarded and clothed him. 



RELIGION AND INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY 183 

Does some one resent such close economic scrutiny 
into the social value of men's lives? Call it not 
only sound economics, but also warm, vital, spiritual 
truth. What if we are about to find that the con- 
sciousness of social usefulness is a precious experience 
of religion? What if the current of religious or 
spiritual life will not any longer run freely into idle, 
lazy, selfish, useless lives, which fail to pay their 
way! 

It is extraordinary that bright men have been so 
slow in catching these ideas. How can any man 
think that he is working for himself? Every one is 
a constructor of the temple of humanity; every one is 
a potential contributor to the work of sustaining and 
strengthening the body of society. Men can hardly 
make national boundaries or tariff walls high enough 
to stop the flow of this common social life. No 
nation can live unto itself any more than an indi- 
vidual can. Do you imagine that the quarrels be- 
tween employers and workmen, which cut down the 
quality and the supply of shoes or clothing, is the 
private affair of a few thousand people? No, it 
affects men and women in Idaho and becomes an- 
other reason for the poverty in the streets of 
London. It is a sore spot upon the body of 
society. 

I do not lay down these propositions as cold mat- 
ters of duty, but as good news, a new motive, a fresh 
hope. We are made to like to play together and 
also to act together. The moment man becomes a 
co-operative being he can never be at his best or 



1 84 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

happy till he is aware of playing his part in the 
orchestra of life. You may almost lay down the 
rule that the deepest wish in a man's heart is that 
he shall count for something worth while among 
his fellows. There is a certain sense of immortality 
in the thought that one has added worth to the 
structure of human life. The builders of the medie- 
val cathedrals must have had something of this 
hopeful fellowship. Their work was a parable for 
men of all time. 

We want a social state in which the whole man 
is in his work. Industrial democracy is nothing less 
than good society. Whenever you are at work, you, 
at your best, useful, skillful, honest, effective, free, 
happy, ought to find other men and women work- 
ing in hope and sympathy and establishing excellent 
comradeship. We have no hard and fast limita- 
tion of the terms of social service, as if only hewers 
of wood and drawers of water were useful, or again 
as if all could ever be equally serviceable. We leave 
nothing out before which you can fairly mark the 
plus sign. We leave out no well-learned lesson in a 
school, no smile of a child, no brave gesture of a 
sick man in the hospital, no " God bless you " from 
the mouth of an old man or woman who can now do 
nothing more than to add sweetness and light to per- 
fect the atmosphere of the home. We count for its 
full worth every picture and song and verse and story 
that makes for beauty and joy. We can afford to 
give everyone his place in the Industrial Democracy. 
We grudge the cost of his living to no one who is 



RELIGION AND INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY 185 

willing to do his part and be modest about it, to 
appreciate also the full worth of his fellows. 

We associate democracy with liberty. In the 
highest sense you can never take away a man's lib- 
erty. They put Socrates in prison, but, as he told 
them, they could not catch his soul. It rests between 
you and God at each moment to be so free, so will- 
ing, so satisfied, heart and soul, with what you have 
to do or bear, that you are beyond the confines of 
time and place and circumstances. But this higher 
meaning of liberty is bound up with, and largely exer- 
cised through, external conditions. Thus a free 
state, as distinguished from a tyranny, opens oppor- 
tunities for all its people to develop and express their 
opinions and to shape its conduct. This fine theory 
of democracy has never yet been attained anywhere. 
We have been disappointed in our American democ- 
racy. We have come to see that no political democ- 
racy can be free or happy, while industrial democ- 
racy does not yet exist. You must throw off all 
shackles from men and women. This is the modern 
message; it is a spiritual message. You will not 
find a solid philosophy, much less a general persua- 
sive motive for it, except on spiritual grounds. 
Those who are going to insist most strenuously upon 
it will be everywhere the men and women of good 
will; that is, religious-minded people. The selfish 
people, high or low, stand to block its way. 

What kind of democratic conditions must we now 
establish in industry? Suppose we imagine one of 



1 86 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

the old-fashioned ship yards on the coast of New 
England a century ago. It was a co-operative en- 
terprise in which half the men of the town might 
have a share in the vessel. Did any man com- 
plain of the pay or the length of the day's work? 
He could go back to the land and be his own master. 
The men who built the ship might have a chance to 
sail with the captain who had launched her. They 
knew one another; the Captain had to be on his 
good behavior if he wished to keep his men — often 
his own neighbors. All the crew might have a 
bonus in the profits of the voyage. 

Contrast these free possibilities, in which the ven- 
ture of a ship or a voyage spelled opportunity, with 
the narrow limitations of a vast modern shop or 
factory or mine. What can men do who find them- 
selves under a tyrannous foreman and at the same 
time at an almost infinite remove from the well- 
guarded superintendent's office? Where are the 
owners of the business? In a dozen States. Who 
makes the rules? Who fixes the pay? Who can 
relieve uncomfortable or unhygienic conditions? 
Who cares for you? Where can you go if you give 
up your place? What if you have a family of little 
children who leave no surplus in your purse at the 
end of the week? If you go away what reason 
have you to expect to find better conditions? Put 
yourself in the place of any one of the million work- 
ing people, such as come to America without know- 
ing the English language, and ask what you would 
do and what you would want. How much would 



RELIGION AND INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY 187 

the right to vote for the President touch your actual 
life? Perhaps you would think bitterly of the peo- 
ple who owned the mill or the mine. You would not 
dream that they might be kindly and justly-inten- 
tioned. You would say that they cared for nothing 
except to make money out of you. How preposter- 
ous it would seem to be told that you and they are 
actual partners in a grand social enterprise, that its 
only justification is in the social service in which the 
owner's savings and capital are combined with the 
earning of your daily bread ! Do you not see that 
here is an actually harsh system of bondage under 
the flag of a free country? 

In war time the President told us that every 
worker counts the same as if each man were a soldier 
in arms. It came as a new idea; of course it was 
absolutely true. But how should it be true in war 
time and not always? The needs of war pass and 
the soldiers are disbanded. But the workers are 
needed forever, not by one nation alone but by all 
humanity, which lives by the common labor. The 
idealistic imagination of millions of workmen act- 
ually caught, and responded to, the President's ap- 
peal. Even the owners and great superintendents 
saw that it must be true. Was it true for the work- 
men and not true for the well-fed owners? Did it 
command the great group to work with a new cheer- 
fulness, and permit the smaller and more powerful 
group to become "profiteers "? The whole nation 
cried out against this shame. But why should reck- 
less gathering in of profits in war time be shameful, 



1 88 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

and reckless selfishness in the treatment of men and 
women still be respectable at any other time ? What 
is there in the nature of war to require a higher re- 
spect for human labor than we should always have 
for it? 

The President, however, did not merely preach a 
sermon to the workers of the nation on the dignity 
of labor and the worth of the individual man; steps 
were at once taken to translate the lesson into action. 
Were the men in shops and mines co-workers with 
soldiers in the field and rich directors in their offices? 
Then they must have at least such wages as became 
their honored and respected callings. Should we 
give every beautiful kind of care to the soldier, and 
take no thought for his brother without whose serv- 
ice he could not move? What a wonderful lesson 
we have been learning of the solidarity of mankind ! 
But this solidarity of mankind is the key to Industrial 
Democracy. Can we ever go back, having caught 
the idea, and do or permit the things that once fet- 
tered the lives of men and imprisoned their spirits? 
Can we ever forget that which alone gave war any 
feeble excuse — the idea of the humanity for which 
men were asked to lay down their lives? 

The vast industries which everywhere lift their big 
walls and chimneys represent a new order — the 
kingdom of mechanical power, of steel and electric- 
ity. They have grown so fast that we have only 
now begun to change them over into human terms. 
We thought that they were here to make money 
for us. We did not see that they would be Frank- 



RELIGION AND INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY 1 89 

ensteins unless we attached them to the spiritual 
ends for which we all exist. We must make them 
into the grandest means ever yet devised for the 
welfare of mankind. We must re-dedicate them 
to the service of humanity. 

The indispensable conditions without which it is 
going to be henceforth intolerable to permit the in- 
dustries of the world to go on, already become quite 
clear. What now would be our wish, if our place 
in the labor world chanced to be as workers among 
other thousands? We should want, first, respect, 
good manners and good temper, not only from the 
heads and managers of the work, but from the pub- 
lic also; that is, from all who share the product of 
the work. The complete structure of democracy 
rests upon this honorable respect, which sees the man 
in every form of working costume, whether he de- 
livers letters, or defends the roadbed of a railroad 
from washouts, or heaves coal. We have felt just 
enough of this spirit in the war time to understand 
how, once shown, it can never be allowed to lapse. 

Next, we should want for ourselves and for the 
sake of our children such wages and conditions as 
tend to develop manly character and self-respect and 
to ensure clean and decent living. We have begun 
to perceive that such conditions run with and not 
against the economies of sound business. We can- 
not afford to pinch and starve our cows and horses. 
Is any modern man so dull as to think we can afford 
to set human lives in squalid terms? The only ra- 



190 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

tional end and aim of organized business is to 
fit men happily and effectively to their work. We 
might have a socialist State and for want of the 
spiritual conditions fail to get and give this demo- 
cratic respect. We might stop a good way short of 
Socialism and, with right human relations, have 
complete respect for each other. 

Next, we want for every one the utmost possible 
freedom of environment. No shop or mine or mill 
must seem to confine men like a prison. We need to 
know that for any good reason we are free to move 
out and change from a factory to the land, or from 
farm work to a trade. I can be content to stay all 
the better when I am not conscripted and forced to 
remain like a serf. 

We want also complete democracy of manage- 
ment. This is not to say that we must have " social- 
ist " management, or majority rule, either in the 
State or the shop. It means something more prec- 
ious and profound. We have had terrible visions 
in almost every nation of the cruel and overbearing 
tyranny of which a multitude is capable, and what 
despots a majority may tolerate or raise to power. 
I call that only a democratic management which is 
characterized throughout by good will, in which 
every interest in the common work, or its product, is 
consulted and enjoys the liberty of expression, of 
criticism, complaint, and constructive suggestion. I 
can imagine a ship's captain, picked out by the own- 
ers, giving men, freely shipping with him, a thor- 
oughly democratic management; and I can imagine a 



RELIGION AND INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY 19 1 

President of a nation, chosen by the secret ballot, tak- 
ing advantage of the party system to usurp and exer- 
cise undemocratic power. How can a democratic 
people ever suffer a President to have the imperial 
control of an army and navy? 

The greatest of all things that we want for the 
happiness or success of our labor is hope. Do you 
wonder that most men have reaped little satisfaction 
from life? What satisfactions worthy of men can 
suppressed populations ever enjoy? Nations have 
run down and faded out. Why? Because the hope 
of achievement has faded. What could you expect 
of the children forced by the need of bread into the 
cotton mills of Lancashire? Only the few could 
even glimpse, over the stunted bodies and minds of 
their fellow workers, the coming dawn and hear a 
valid call to make themselves ready to welcome it. 

Everything composing man's life is electric to 
spiritual conditions. High wages, adequate food, 
clean work-rooms, and comfortable housing are by 
themselves like the connecting wires, vain unless the 
power runs over and through them. They could not 
even exist till an age had come when loyalty, friend- 
liness, justice, had set up proper batteries to fit them 
to act upon thousands of hearts. They could not 
satisfy human beings unless a new atmosphere of 
confidence, mutuality, good will, and the hope of the 
new day were warming their souls. The Industrial 
Democracy is greater and better than any definition 
of it. It is religious. It fits into a conception of 
God's world — no selfish devil's world. It belongs 



192 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

to the realm of integrity, harmony, music, and happi- 
ness. It is such an organization of the work of the 
world, so free and yet so intelligent, as tends to 
bring each man to his best and to fit loyal and 
friendly men to the most abundant service of all, 
combining welfare and happiness. It cannot possi- 
bly come about through the most ingenious machin- 
ery; it will always be creating and renewing its tools 
and sending useless worn out gearing to the scrap 
heap. It is vital and growing; and the best of it is 
that you can never quite attain to its inexhaustible 
possibilities. See under our eyes how a few nations, 
half awake to the call of the needy humanity, can 
feed and clothe a starving, desolated world, racked 
with strife. What might we not do, altogether 
awake; trusting where we now distrust; comrades all, 
where we still fear enemies; free at last of barriers 
and divisive jealousies; educated where we are now 
illiterate ; sharing immense common hopes, the forces 
of the spirit of men set to match the unexhausted re- 
sources of material power? 



II 

EDUCATION FOR THE PEOPLE 

A new kind of education is wanted to match the re- 
quirements of a democratic regime, to prepare a peo- 
ple for truly civilized life, and finally to lift the level 
of all humanity. There must be a new flexibility of 
methods suitable to a vital and growing organism. 
There must be no arbitrary line at which any one's 
education is assumed to come to an end. Arrange- 
ment must be made for the continual teaching of a 
people, none of whom can ever grow too old to 
learn. 

In the old days, and very lately too, on the conti- 
nent of Europe, they provided for the education of 
a small class to command, while the body of the peo- 
ple were prepared to work and fight and obey. The 
traditions and methods of this intolerable dualistic 
training still hold a dead hand over our minds. 
Some of its culture was doubtless excellent. We 
have to educate no longer an aristocratic class to 
command, but we have the larger enterprise of 
training a multitude of men and women, out of whom 
a better and more numerous leadership than ever 
was before shall be evolved. As individuals cannot 
have a surplusage of intelligence or virtue, so the 

193 



194 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

commonwealth cannot possess a surplus of trained 
and high-minded candidates for every kind of office 
and leadership. The more fit men, the better. 

The fundamental requirement of a democratic ed- 
ucation is that it shall fit every one to be useful in 
the largest sense. Every one must produce some 
actual social value ; we can exempt no one from this 
test. What good can you do for society? How 
can any one possess a rich and all-round culture 
without welcoming this law of the common life? 
Who is content to be useless? 

Let no one suppose, because this seems obvious, 
that we have more than begun to persuade every 
one in America to believe it. Do we not know men, 
like hereditary Hessian dukes, who assume that 
they have a right to live on the wealth of their 
grandfathers, on the unearned increment of a corner 
lot, or on the profits of a lucky speculation, and that 
they can " found a family " to go on living after 
them without any useful work? Have not working 
men often the same bee in their bonnets, and while 
they now belong to a labor union, would they not 
like the chance also to found a family, as such men 
do now and then out of partnerships to which they 
have risen in the steel business? Let us then write 
into our bottommost creed our belief that the nor- 
mal end and aim of every man as long as he lives 
is predominantly social, to be useful and ever more 
useful. Why should we wish to live, if our presence 
here only cumbers the ground? 

What would a Thoreau say to this? Must he 



EDUCATION FOR THE PEOPLE 195 

give up his individualism and go into a factory? 
But Thoreau was wonderfully honest and scrupu- 
lous. Do we recollect on how little he lived? 
Neither did he spend what others had earned for 
him. Besides, in the wide scope of social influence, 
we include the adventurers and experimenters, the 
men of the " free lance " who, impelled by an in- 
spiration no less normal than that of the poet or 
artist, take to the woods, or roam and tramp, and 
on occasion make a psalm or tell their story or pub- 
lish their records, as Thoreau did, and show to tame 
minds unknown wonders of creation. But these, 
too* are unworthy of their free life unless they bow 
to the social law : they must be honest and pay their 
fare like the rest; least of all must they pollute the 
sources of life for their own gratification. 

See now how far the ideal of a democracy alters 
the emphasis of education. Men have been trained 
to compete and get the advantage, to win out by loud 
advertising, to think it a good trade in which the 
other party loses, to create monopolies, to shut their 
markets against the business of other nations. Men 
have been told to skimp their w,Ork and to get more 
than they give. The new education teaches the able 
and bright men to find their profit in excellent pro- 
duct and abundant fulfillment of their promises, in 
sharing their advantages with the others, in con- 
tributing to the total wealth, in breaking down bar- 
riers that constrain international trade, and taking 
every nation into partnership with them. Here is 
the way of truth, friendliness, philosophy, religion, 



196 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

of the utmost product also and therefore the greatest 
net dividend of material gain. Moreover, men 
who could never succeed in a vulgar strife to trip 
others up will now find their opportunity for benefi- 
cent success. 

The democratic ideal throws nothing of educa- 
tive value out of its curriculum — no art, no lan- 
guage, u dead " or alive, no portion of history, no 
detail of science, no high reach of abstract mathe- 
matics. At the same time it asks rigorously: 
What is the use of it? and is prepared to give an 
answer. No knowledge is alien to the searching 
mind of man. No curiosity to know must be 
thwarted. The best State University supported by 
the people must provide no narrower opportunity 
for its youth than the most richly endowed of the 
old colleges intended to train professional men. 

The people desire their sons and daughters to 
enjoy every facility that the nobility once had. This 
means no such slovenly conversation and writing as 
we tolerate now: it means correct grammar, truth- 
ful choice of words, an ample vocabulary, distinct 
speech, well-trained and agreeable voices, an inner 
sincerity matched with persuasive expression. 
What was once only feebly attained by the " edu- 
cated class " is now made the standard of prepara- 
tion for life for average youth. Why not? Do 
you want your children to be content with less than 
the best? Remember, too, that this is for all races 
and classes. If it is good for white children, the 
doors must be open equally for black or brown. In- 



EDUCATION FOR THE PEOPLE 1 97 

deed the poorest State cannot afford to do less; it 
will grow rich only as it grows generous. 

Good manners were once, and still are, a suppos- 
edly special mark of the " gentry," or of a " lib- 
eral " education. Even so the rule always was 
noblesse oblige. We, the democracy, universalize 
this. We desire as courteous treatment as was ever 
given to princes, at shops, hotels, on the street, from 
hackmen, baggage men, country men. Courtesy, as 
shown at a king's court, is nothing but the treatment 
due to every man and woman who has worth; that 
is, who is useful. We like it and we owe it. Our 
education must include it, and begin early with it as 
the real aristocrats used to do. You cannot put it 
on as a cloak; it belongs at the heart before it comes 
out in the face and the voice. Can you bear to hear 
your own child abusive or insolent to others, espe- 
cially to those less well off than himself? 

Human life is a continual process of adjustment — 
to environment, to work or profession, to one's fel- 
lows and their devious ways and behavior, to the 
State and the laws, to the necessities of travel and 
the customs of foreign peoples, to the variations of 
sickness and health, of good fortune or loss. Edu- 
cation is the science of adjustments. It makes one 
a " man of the world," at home everywhere and 
under all circumstances, always able to adapt him- 
self to changed conditions, to bear sorrow, to be un- 
afraid of death. Every new experience may be edu- 
ucative to such a person as this. The democratic 



198 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

ideal of fundamental usefulness tends specially to 
educate people in this ready adjustability. We pro- 
claim that every boy or girl — and we are saying to- 
day every wounded or crippled soldier — must be 
able to do something well, if possible well enough to 
bring its reward. We are doubtless going to pro- 
vide ample vocational training, but better yet, a 
broad aptitude to do not one thing alone, but many 
things — whatever calls for skill, patience, energy, 
courage, resourcefulness, invention, enterprise, will. 
This in itself will constitute a new kind of liberal 
education, and a new and broader freedom to the 
rank and file of men. It will not be enough to say 
that a man is well read in the law, a teacher of lan- 
guage or a good salesman. What else can he do? 
How could he earn his living if he were not wanted 
in law or in teaching? There is no end to the sug- 
gestions that occur, as soon as we consider how 
broad must be the training to fit the adjustments of 
life. 

Can the people afford such training as we have 
in mind? People who can raise billions of dollars 
for war, with nothing tangible to show for the ex- 
penditure, can surely raise whatever is needed to in- 
crease not only the common wealth but the most 
precious kind of wealth — wealth in man-power. 
What else is real wealth? 

Will it ever be worth while to educate every one 
as well as hitherto only the few have been educated? 
We must consider the diverse possibilities and men- 
tal powers of different children. Our intent is to 



EDUCATION FOR THE PEOPLE 199 

offer opportunity for every one. We shall not force 
education upon reluctant minds or use our schools 
as places of imprisonment. Neither, on the other 
hand, shall we tolerate those " blind alleys " in in- 
dustry that shut the doors of hope against the de- 
velopment of skill and intelligence. The doors of 
the schools ought to swing to let children out, and 
also to invite them to return at any time. You can 
never tell when youth supposed to be dull may wake 
up to a fresh intellectual life. You can never sur- 
mise what undreamed powers a new love or hope or 
ambition or genuine experience of religion may add 
to yourself or any one else. What teacher or neigh- 
bor of Oliver Cromwell saw in him the master poli- 
tical mind of his age till his soul was caught with the 
contagion of the Puritan religion ! 

The center of human life is in the will. In its 
free or highest power it is the greatest gift of the 
gods. So far this power is very rare. The most 
brilliant minds, the most kindly disposed and hu- 
mane people have, as a rule, little will to match 
their promise. Can will be educated; that is, 
brought into play and developed? We have hardly 
yet tried to find out. Every other quality in man 
can be educated. Why not the central life power? 
No one can estimate what it would mean to the av- 
erage man, and therefore to the nation, to double 
his will power ! 

When we set out to educate the will, what is it 
that we mean? We mean nothing less than a good 



200 a RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

will, humane, social, friendly, effective for the com- 
mon service. What an intolerable miseducation it 
would be to add power to selfish wills ! We do this 
when we say in act or word: " Every man for him- 
self." We tend to do it by our system of marks 
and honors. We do it for young voters with our 
cheap partisanship. The will grows normally in the 
atmosphere of enthusiasm, hope, courage, idealism. 
We have put will into war; we need to put a better 
will into the service of man. To say we can before 
each worthy enterprise, to say it in the face of perils 
and pessimism, to say it in view of the enormous 
task of making the world fit to live in, comes next to 
thinking and willing it. We can, is waste, unless it 
leads on to we will. I will by itself is weak or per- 
verse ; re-enforce it then ; to say we will with a million 
voices for a great and generous cause, for all na- 
tions, is to become irresistible. 

In one sense / will is hopelessly weak. This is so 
if I will for myself. In a higher sense there is no 
act of the will so grand and original as when we say, 
" I will," bidden by conscience, led by a noble vision, 
warmed by a true love. Is there any people who 
need this kind of will power so much as Americans 
do? We have plenty of physical courage, as well- 
fed men are apt to have. From boyhood up, how- 
ever, we have little of the courage of free men — 
the will to stand up and say what we think when no 
one else says it, to vote with a minority or to vote 
alone, to protest against an injustice or cruelty in 
the face of our fellows, our party, our labor union. 



EDUCATION FOR THE PEOPLE 201 

We are mortally afraid of what people will say 
about us, of being laughed at, of being unpopular, 
of losing trade and favor. Our legislators and Con- 
gressmen are rarely corrupt, but most of them do 
the service of the " grafters." Astonishingly few 
of them are strong enough to say an independent 
" I will " for the welfare of the people. The av- 
erage American Board of Directors may have no in- 
tention to wrong a rival company or underpay their 
employees, but which of them will venture to offer 
a reform of any customary dishonorable procedure? 
It was just such lack of courage in the Jewish San- 
hedrin that made them infamous ! 

Has democracy possibly lost something that the 
kings and aristocrats possessed? Were these per- 
haps more bluntly truthful, being sure that no one 
could laugh them out of court? We teach that a 
man is the peer of any king. Why should he be 
afraid to say his honest thought? Why should the 
citizens of a democracy always wait to vote on the 
popular side, careless whether it is good or bad? 
Why not train our boys and girls to be as fearless as 
princes ever were ? It is well now and then to say : 
" We are the sons and daughters of God." 

We have talked bravely about the free peoples of 
the world, deeming ourselves so free as to be able to 
confer freedom upon the others. We do not yet 
understand what freedom is. We call a people free 
if it has no king or House of Lords. This is the 
shell of freedom. We propose a toast to the health 
of all of the peoples. May they possess souls as 



202 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

free as their bodies are free! We mean freedom 
from fear. We mean freedom from vain, foolish 
desires and ambitions, as the disciplined seaman is 
free from the fear of the storm. This is the work 
of good education. The free man has plenty of re- 
sources; he does not need to be dismayed at the 
prospect of losing his money. He can lead a happy 
life with little money. He is not afraid of a change 
of government or the coming of a different indus- 
trial scheme. He can fall on his feet and be useful 
somehow and somewhere. Misunderstanding and 
persecution cannot control the movement of his free 
soul. But he cannot bear to see the democracy 
playing the part of the tyrant and checking the free 
speech and bolder thought through whose vigor its 
sons and daughters get their needful practice in the 
ways of liberty ! 

Do the American people imagine that they are 
getting the education of free men in the public 
schools? What if teachers have no idea of true 
liberty? What if teachers set the authority of a 
book or of their own words above the free action of 
the child's mind, his own study of the facts, and the 
use of his judgment? What if teachers are made to 
stand in awe of the officialdom of a system, to the 
deprivation of their own freedom? What if con- 
scientious teachers are dismissed because in a time 
of war-hysteria they kept a fair and open mind? 
You can never have free schools where your teachers 
are publicly discouraged from the exercise of free 
souls ! 



EDUCATION FOR THE PEOPLE 203 

Shall a democracy undergo the discipline of mili- 
tary training? How faintly the moss-backed minds 
which proclaim the necessity of war to teach hero- 
ism understand the spiritual nature of heroism and 
the glorious episodes of human history! The brav- 
est of men have always been the lovers of men. 
Did they have to practice the art of killing men in 
order to achieve heroism? You may boast that the 
idealism shown by American youth in the war was 
beyond anything in military annals; yet this superb 
courage, resting on a spiritual faith, was the pro- 
duct of a people who had never tolerated military 
discipline and had grown up in the teachings of 
peace. 

It is absurd however to say that a government 
labelled a " Republic " may not be militaristic. 
Suppose it holds colonies maintained by force, as 
the United States has held the Philippine Islands. 
It is little that a nation has democratic political in- 
stitutions, if it has imperialist annexations, if it has 
an undemocratic industrial system, if its education 
is not directed to foster democratic sentiment or 
faith. Suppose every child is used to seeing march- 
ing troops; suppose the boys in every high school 
or college are trained to handle rifles and shoot 
with precision. Suppose every great port has its 
frequent display of monster battleships. Suppose 
the histories in use are weighted with the items of 
war and battles. What an immense educative effect 
these things have upon the mind at its most suscepti- 
ble period! Nothing can prevent this effect from 



204 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

being inhuman and undemocratic. For what pur- 
pose is this vast and costly preparation made? To 
be ready to kill men like ourselves. To defend our- 
selves against " wicked people," our possible ene- 
mies, who are presumably educating their boys and 
girls to fear us. Why do not ministers of religion 
protest against an education which costs more than 
all the rest of the national expenses, which conflicts 
with and denies all that churches and synagogues 
stand for ! The ministers have been drugged with 
this miseducation from childhood. Harmonize it, 
if you can, with vital democracy, with humanity, with 
the essential teachings of religion! This is to try 
to force two and two to be five in the spiritual 
realm ! 



Ill 

THE TESTS OF GOOD EDUCATION 

There are certain tests of education that enter 
into no examinations for the granting of degrees. 
The first of these is an open mind, candor, integrity; 
it is at once the object, the method and the test of a 
" liberal education." What has there been in the 
college work of the most famous universities to for- 
bid the graduate from turning out a violent parti- 
san, a bitter jingo, or a special pleader for injus- 
tice? Through the time of the late war university 
professors bearing the most honored degrees have 
been liable to excommunication from the goodly so- 
ciety of scholars unless their opinions were in ac- 
cord with the prevailing political demand. Thus, 
when the utmost wisdom was needed to steer the 
ship of state, all expert minority expression of his- 
torians and philosophers was suppressed! Do not 
say that this was owing to the fact of the war. The 
mischief lay deeper. The habit and the demand for 
the open mind did not prevail in the universities, 
as it did not prevail in the churches and among the 
people. Where was any great college president 
standing to protest against the suppression of truth? 
Where did students catch the democratic note of 
truth " at any price "? 

205 



206 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

The democracy deserves to be better served. 
" The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the 
truth," only yet conventionally demanded in the 
courts, professed to be good for scholars, is not too 
good for the people. In their name we discard se- 
cret diplomacy; in their name we ask all governmen- 
tal proceedings to be brought into the light. No 
little group of officials shall be able to misrepresent 
the conduct of a sister State or our fair intentions 
toward them. The villainy of the war system could 
never be begun or carried on, except for the mis- 
understanding and falsehood of governmental peo- 
ple who have never taken a degree in candor, open- 
mindedness, or humanity. The habit of fairness in 
discussion and the love of the truth better merit 
the title of a liberal education than the possession 
of academic honors. Beware of the man who does 
not wish to know or to tell the truth, or refuses ever 
to confess himself in the Wrong ! 

Let us set forth another test of sound education. 
What college degree certifies that its holder can 
keep his temper? We hold that no man is educated 
who has not control of his temper. We ask as 
much as this of a trained horse or dog. Why do we 
not expect it of educated men and women? Does 
any one reflect how largely the catastrophes in hu- 
man history and the tragedies in domestic life arise 
from a spark struck from a choleric or ugly temper, 
starting fire in the ordinary tinder of hasty wrath 
which all sorts and conditions of men, " ladies and 
gentlemen" too, carry about with them? Why 



THE TESTS OF GOOD EDUCATION 207 

should not kindly temper, well composed of thought- 
fulness, consideration, and sympathy, be the greatest 
measure and end of a thorough and liberal educa- 
tion, as well as the practical man's most precious 
asset for business, for politics, for the molding of 
public opinion? There will be no more strikes or 
occasion for strikes when we give degrees for the 
possession of good temper ! I do not mean parch- 
ment degrees; I mean a general understanding and 
valuation of this hitherto rare power, and such a 
new insistent demand for it as shall create the 
supply. 

Our third test of a liberal education is the pos- 
session of a generous public spirit. We boast of 
our free education. Does it carry no obligations 
for public service at the hands of our millions of 
school graduates? Where do five citizens in a hun- 
dred show any public spirit? Skeptics about de- 
mocracy tell us that at this point it always breaks 
down. People do not care what happens to their 
State or city. They are indifferent to waste and 
fraud and unhygienic conditions, and well satisfied 
to be served by clever rogues. Is this complaint go- 
ing to prove true after the terrible war? Will any 
democractic nation again allow the most momen- 
tous of all decisions, the declaration of war, to be 
foisted upon them without so much of a plebiscite as 
they take in a town that lays out a new highway? 
Shall we educate our youth to make money and not 
to have any interest in those common affairs through 
which the health and wealth, the happiness and the 



208 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

safety of a state are secured? Our universities 
surely have not yet distinguished themselves by their 
success in developing the public spirit of their grad- 
uates. 

I say these things in no pessimist humor. The 
same infinite fund of humanity on which the nation 
drew for a year of war — the sense of responsibil- 
ity, the desire to do each man his part and be of 
use, the social and co-operative will, is ever with 
us ready to be tapped. Shall we use it to destroy, 
and not learn to use it for pure good and the gen- 
eral welfare? Shall we let ourselves be conscripted 
to go to war, and be too unintelligent to set the 
beautiful new fashion of turning on the accumulated 
public spirit of millions of enlightened fellow cit- 
izens for the achievement of the public ends? 
There may well be streams of various opinion to 
create minor party divisions among us, but why 
should not a democratic people move together, and 
not in opposition to one another, to perform its vast 
public tasks? 

A fourth point in good education concerns the 
valuations and desires of men. How shall we rear 
children to know what the biggest and most real 
values are; what it is worth while to desire and 
what is comparatively negligible? The law of the 
happy life is to do, to give, to save, to leave a better 
society. Where do we lay the just emphasis on 
this? Suppose we really believed it in the churches ! 
Evidently we are going to lose the best of life if we 
manage not to put that first of all which alone is first. 



THE TESTS OF GOOD EDUCATION 209 

I have tried in this chapter and the one before 
it to answer the gravest of questions. Men cynic- 
ally ask what motives are adequate to keep man- 
kind up to the mark of the good life. Once you 
could preach the fear of hell and drive men in the 
path of religion. But this motive, which never 
made a man good, hardly works at all with the 
modern man. It has been said that " the love of 
Christ " works to change human lives from bad to 
good. Grant gladly that the idea of a grand com- 
rade or leader, conceived as walking with us and 
directing our way comes to some men with a de- 
cisive appeal and changes their lives to a fresh level 
of vision and conduct; grant that this is one of the 
forms in which the supreme fact of the creative life 
of God appears to men; yet this hitherto has proved 
an exceptional experience. It strikes most modern 
minds as remote and mystical. How many of its 
preachers show the slightest power to carry it into 
the hearts of this vast, busy, toiling world! 

I believe that we need and possess the mightiest 
working motives for the good life that men ever 
conceived. Taken together they present a universal 
appeal. They are found in the facts of life and in 
the happiest life experiences of all sorts of men of 
divers religions. They include freely whatever 
power there is in the memory of the great historic 
leaders and saints, of Moses, of Jesus, of Buddha, 
of Confucius. They go wider and they take up 
innumerable more humble memories, such as the 
common man carries, of loving parents, brothers and 



210 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

friends. They fit in with profound human desires. 
They have behind them, as we are coming to see, an 
inevitable necessity. The fact is that when once 
you deal with men as men, nothing but these spir- 
itual motives — memories, ideals, faiths, friendships 
— all working toward the growth and use of a hu- 
mane will, can do the world's business. You can 
try every lower motive but you will be forever 
forced back till you take the single way where life 
runs freely. Man, once risen to see himself as a 
man, cannot prosper — either the individual or the 
family or the nation — unless he functions as a 
man and not as a brute. This is why practices such 
as slavery, tyranny and war are doomed. 

The methods fitting a better education must al- 
ways wait on the vision of what we aim to secure. 
You cannot write them rigidly in a book. Many 
will recall the little story: " How He Carried the 
Message to Garcia." The idea of it was that as 
soon as the messenger put his will upon his task, he 
instinctively used every way that would help him 
arrive. So with our educational processes. You 
have an ideal of a proper man or woman. All sorts 
of excellences are united in this ideal. But the es- 
sence of it is a free, willing, purposeful mind, seeing 
great ends and seeking to do them. Parent or 
teacher or school can only assist. The life bubbles 
up from within. Take away restraints, wake up 
hidden interests, give plenty of the material of nur- 
ture. Give the open door into literature, give field 
for daily practice, stir the imagination, bind theory 



THE TESTS OF GOOD EDUCATION 21 1 

and practice together. Best of all, without which 
all the rest will be barren, be yourself, at whatever 
price, the kind of man or woman whom you wish to 
see prevail in the world. You say the great " Beat- 
titudes." Believe them then. They mark the type 
of mankind that " shall inherit the earth." Note 
that word. It is this earth, for which the rule of 
the gentle, the righteous, the peacemakers and all 
the others of like friendly aims is destined. Your 
hope of any life or heaven beyond is based on 
showing whether there can be produced here that 
which is worthy to be preserved. 



IV 

THE WINNING OF THE WORLD 

Is veritable progress possible? Can man control 
and direct it? This is the hope of the ages; but 
many minds are anxious and doubtful about it to- 
day. The time of greatest need has often proved 
the fittest time of deliverance. The answer turns 
largely, if not wholly, upon our faith in the spiritual 
nature of the world to which the nature of man re- 
acts. " If God be for us, who can be against us? " 
If the stars in their courses are in tune with the laws 
of justice, we have everything to hope. 

The movement of the world as related to human 
progress has hitherto been like a drift. But this is 
not to say that the drift has had no general and posi- 
tive direction. On the contrary, it seems to be as 
markedly directed in its slow and cumbrous motion 
as is the vast drift of the solar system, or the growth 
and development of a child. As if to prove that 
man is in some true sense a son of the Mind of the 
Universe, and especially of the Eternal Goodness, the 
drift of human progress has surely been toward a 
prevailing sense of humanity. The great war makes 
this not less, but more, certain. The war has set 
millions to thinking what to do together after the 
war, and not alone for two or three belligerent na- 

212 



THE WINNING OF THE WORLD 213 

tions, but in behalf of the people of the remote 
islands and of darkest Africa. What can we do 
together to establish democratic civilization? 

Grant that the law of the brute world worked 
first through constant experiment and venture, un- 
der pressure of the environment upon every creature 
and race. But the birth of consciousness alters this 
earlier law. The urging life is now within, not only 
answering back to its surroundings, but also becom- 
ing sensitive and gathering to itself ancestral habits 
and instincts and so creating a headway and momen- 
tum of intelligence. Consciousness gives the creat- 
ure a share in the process of molding its life. 

The wonder of wonders is that man asks and 
cannot help asking what he is here for, and what 
life is. "What is the chief end of man?" No 
other creature asks this. The wonder is not less but 
more when man goes on to find an answer and to 
crown himself a " son of God." It is not the arro- 
gant who do this : it is the meek or modest. It is 
not answered in haughty self-sufficiency, but in su- 
preme independence. No royal career ever imag- 
ined was so grand as the aim of the common man 
who wills to live so as to share the thoughts of per- 
fect justice, to discover truth, and to help bring in 
the reign of a universal democratic commonwealth ! 
In one way or another many men now steer their way 
by this aim. Imagine what a thousand men and 
women in every capital of the world, determined 
upon this intent, might do to accomplish it ! Its few 
obvious guiding words, like so many stars in a con- 



214 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

stellation, are Democracy, Civilization, Co-opera- 
tion, Good Will, Humanity. Well understood, each 
and all of them bring the same message. Individ- 
uals have dared to try to apply them to smaller 
quests, to shaping the future of single nations, to the 
systematic planning of worthy cities for every one's 
children, to the conduct of vast possessions by the 
guidance of the expert " social engineer," to the re- 
construction of religion into a church which shall ex- 
clude no truthful mind and shall make all human be- 
ings welcome. All these visions and endeavors 
point the same way. We soon find that we must 
take over the organization of the world into our 
programme. All lesser plans belong really to this 
larger one. All nations wait for the coming of the 
universal commonwealth. Kings fall from their 
thrones and give up their palaces to make ready for 
the peoples. Men of diverse tongues are seeking to 
get at each other in a speech which all races may 
know. Congresses of scientists, physicians, hygien- 
ists, working men, suffragists, Chambers of Com- 
merce, Federations of Churches, cross the oceans out 
of this common interest. 

The development of a profound idea cannot be 
too closely defined, or reduced to too rigid details. 
It is enough if we distinguish pretty clearly the great 
highlands for which we steer. Any man of ordinary 
vision ought now to see them. Who that possesses 
decent humanity can hesitate to contribute his meas- 
ure of devotion to reach them? 

First, we must seek to establish a far better politi- 



THE WINNING OF THE WORLD 215 

cal democracy than the United States or any other 
country has ever had. The present unthinking 
temper of multitudes of Americans does not promise 
for a long period ahead to make democratic liber- 
ties safe. Most men seem to imagine a mysterious 
virtue in the act of voting: they worship a majority, 
however dishonestly secured or conscripted. They 
fail to see how overbearing and cruel a majority may 
be ; they do not understand that the will of however 
large a multitude can no more make an action or 
choice right than an Emperor's armies or the angry 
outcry of a mob. In many cases, however, our 
present machinery is not right. It gives the least 
possible freedom to develop independence and to 
bring able and disinterested leadership to the front. 
It does not begin fairly to represent different groups 
and interests among the people. Its prevailing bi- 
partisanship is deadening. Proportional represen- 
tation is coming to be seen as the most important 
piece of progressive and democratic machinery to 
secure a just representative government. Already 
its presence or absence in a state or city is a test 
of the democratic thoughtfulness of the electorate. 
Why should the socialists in the United States be 
without a vote in the national Senate? Why 
should so great an interest as the schools and uni- 
versities have no representative in Congress and the 
state Legislatures? You must give the good spirit 
a chance to breathe and utter itself, or it cannot 
thrive. 

Next, is it not evident that we must immediately 



2l6 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

enlist a great crusade not merely to prevent war, but 
to abolish it altogether? War is the denial of valid 
democracy at every point. The free nation, going 
armed, at once sets up autocracy. Its President, 
with however great powers innocent enough as an 
elected civilian administrator, once made comman- 
der-in-chief of an army and navy, becomes an im- 
perial personage. Every one knows how abnormal 
power of any sort over men, worst of all over fight- 
ing forces, tends toward arrogance in the man who 
possesses it. Even the carrying of deadly weapons 
is a disorderly element, altering the face, the tone, 
the nature. Few can resist it. No army can be 
democratic. For the function of an army is to kill 
men; whereas the foundation of democracy is hu- 
man respect. It is impossible to have such respect 
in men's hearts and at the same time to go out on 
expeditions to shoot other men and blow up their 
cities. 

Of course, the simple and natural way to get rid 
of war is to disarm altogether. A society of free 
nations made up of democratic people obviously has 
no need of armaments to fight one another. It 
would seem as if the weary, sorrowful, bruised 
world might have had enough of the lesson of the 
Great War to see the egregious futility of militarism 
and to abolish it. It is more than possible that 
every other people might be willing to heed an hon- 
est call from the United States, as the boasted cham- 
pion of the democratic cause, to disarm at once. If 
Americans could say, " We are willing," why should 



THE WINNING OF THE WORLD 217 

not the rest be willing too? If we are not willing, 
who will be? Why should we not be more than 
willing? Is it possible that the fears, the suspi- 
cions, the jealousies, the hate, the subtle arrogance 
of men in power, the feebleness and timidity of 
churches, and the national pride, which have always 
permitted and created wars, are flowing in a fuller 
tide than ever before? We have suffered a fetich 
worship of nationalism and patriotism sweeping like 
a disease over the earth. The real democracy in a 
people, on the contrary, is in inverse ratio to nation- 
alist pride and fervor. For the lover of men, how- 
ever loyally he seeks the welfare of his own State, 
cares least of all things where his neighbor was born 
or what race he belongs to. Neither does he dream 
of confining his neighborly interest within the chang- 
ing boundary lines of a map. 

If now we discover that the world, and even the 
most favored nation in it, like the ruined cities of 
old, still insists upon putting its trust in horses and 
chariots, in submarines and airplanes, if pride still 
" rules our will," all the more clearly rises the call of 
our duty to establish a new party, a new enterprise, 
and to use every possible effort to break down the 
war system. Dr. Charles W. Eliot, long the hon- 
ored President of Harvard College, once raised the 
question whether any religion had yet set itself to put 
an end to war? This question has hitherto had to 
be shamefully answered, " No : except a few small 
sects." This fact sets the new task for a living 
church in the realm of practical " Christian En- 



218 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

deavor." What veto are American churches now 
going to urge to our renewed military and naval ex- 
penditures, to the proposed universal military train- 
ing, to the menace of conscription, to the suppression 
of minority thought, to the cruelty of treatment and 
the severity of the punishments, made possible under 
a militaristic regime, of men whose single crime was 
that they had taken in earnest the famous beatitude : 
" Blessed are the peace-makers! " These questions 
are of practical moment to men who believe in re- 
ligion. 

Again, we want a League of Nations. What 
kind of league? Shall it be organized and com- 
pelled by force, as many assure us? Shall every 
member of it maintain its army? Shall warships 
continue to make the seas perilous? In short, shall 
we build into our international temple the old-world 
ill-tempered mortar of mutual fear and distrust? 
What strong word has democracy or religion to op- 
pose to this truly pagan proposition, fortified by 
great names of " statesmen " and teachers? Can 
we command so little wisdom, determination, and 
knowledge of human nature and history as to begin 
our enterprise with threats of economic and military 
force and the programme of a continued war estab- 
lishment, " camouflaged " under the name of interna- 
tional police? Be assured, if we are not yet ready 
to form a friendly league of equals, if we must wait 
upon it with loaded guns, if we cannot be trusted or 
trust others to give and to expect fair treatment, if 
we will not do ourselves what we wish smaller na- 



THE WINNING OF THE WORLD 219 

tions to do, our failure will not be the fault of the 
plain peoples and the workers of the world, but 
rather of the sophisticated and Pharisee class, the 
Tories and the conservatives, always more careful 
for considerations of wealth than for human wel- 
fare, and blind as usual to democratic and spiritual 
issues. Here is the opportunity for a living church. 
What does it live for except to convert the wills of 
men to follow its shining ideals? 

Again, there is no civilization which keeps up bar- 
riers between its various peoples. You can measure 
the degree of civilization by this test. To break 
down the barriers between the peoples is at the same 
time good political economy and real religion. We 
want a world on which no custom-house shall rear 
its forbidding walls. We want no more forts to 
bar us from one another. The ugly forts now 
match the tariff barriers. We collect duties in order 
to pay the expenses of war. We should never need 
the tariff revenues if we would scuttle the battle- 
ships. These institutions stands to perpetuate di- 
visive jealousies and greed. Both of them rest upon 
ignorance of industrial laws and of human nature. 
If trade is mutual, as it must be to live, why then 
do we wish to confine it? If we are in any real 
sense, of " one blood " with Europeans and Asiatics, 
as we profess to be, then it is inhumane to be afraid 
to share our good gifts and products with them. 
We have been ready to feed them in a time of world 
catastrophe. But freedom of trade with them is 



220 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

the natural way of sharing our gifts ; it is kinder than 
charity. 

One more immense world problem will suffice here 
to illustrate the new task of steering the course of 
human progress. Hundreds of millions of people 
in various parts of the earth, largely in Africa, have 
never been counted as civilized. Even where, as in 
South America, they have had the forms of modern 
government, they have been too illiterate to know 
the difference between a republic and a despotism. 
A half dozen imperialistic governments have cast 
the eyes of cupidity upon those backward regions, 
and eager commercial adventurers have competed to 
exploit the lands and peoples. The Great War 
would not have broken out except for this provoking 
cause, for competing " spheres of influence," for col- 
onies where white men would not emigrate. 

What will the League of Nations do to protect 
backward peoples from the avarice and cruelty of 
the powerful and unscrupulous, to further the ad- 
vancement of all such people toward a place of re- 
spect in the family of nations and, again, to forbid 
imperialistic greed from ever starting a conflagra- 
tion in the world? Here is the practical applica- 
tion of a veritable religion. The Monroe Doctrine 
is only one branch of this larger issue. As a merely 
American doctrine it has become a source of danger. 
The States south of us have no use for it. In the 
establishment of a genuine and friendly League of 
Nations we shall never have use for it. It becomes 
therefore of singular and momentous consequence to 



THE WINNING OF THE WORLD 221 

us what kind of a League of Nations we propose to 
form. Shall we form it in fear and jealousy? 
Shall we make it a new peril to the world? Or shall 
we leave the seeds of war altogether out of it? 
Shall we use instead the best and most democratic 
leadership in every nation, the men of the people, 
the kindly, the just, as its chosen administrators and 
advisers? Shall we use the democratic method of 
persuasion, or fall back upon the mischievous old 
means of compulsion? The proposed League it- 
self is hardly more important than the growth of a 
nobler public opinion, without which no organization 
can fulfill its expectations. We have in the next 
chapter to consider certain immense changes that 
democratic ideas are making in the nature of every 
government. Our League of Nations will be seen 
to take on a different form in view of this alteration 
of the aim, the method, and the function of gov- 
ernment. 



DEMOCRATIC GOVERNMENT AND THE 
WORLD ORDER 

We need, in the light of the new vision of a hu- 
mane type of man, a new set of words and phrases 
in our ethics and our religion, and specially a new 
understanding of the popular words concerning gov- 
ernment. The inevitable working of the evolution- 
ary movement changes the nature of all govern- 
ments. This upward movement, beginning in the 
case of men as with all other animals in the region 
of force, conflict and struggle to live, at first ruth- 
less of antagonists, becoming gradually softened by 
mother love and the love of children into a sense 
of mutual aid and co-operation, grows now to a point 
where unexpectedly the higher spiritual principle 
takes precedence over the brutal impulses. Brute 
force gives way to the superior rule of humanity, 
good will, love. It is like one of the surprises 
worked in things; for instance, in the change of 
water to steam, when the mere increase of heat 
brings to pass a seemingly new substance, invisible, 
but acting with all the more effectiveness. This is 
the nature of evolution as it works in the realm of 
the spirit. 

The old-fashioned view was that all government 
222 



DEMOCRATIC GOVERNMENT 223 

rests ultimately upon the use of compelling force; 
this still hypnotizes the minds of many men who 
ought to know better. The word govern itself 
seems to carry by derivation the idea that one or a 
few steer, rule or command, and others obey. The 
divine government is thus the management of a pun- 
ishing lawgiver who enforces his will upon the world. 
His subjects must obey willy-nilly or suffer his anger. 
The family is a little government on the same pat- 
tern — the parents or perhaps the male parent, be- 
ing the master with his ultimate right to break the 
will of a rebellious child. Even when we have se- 
cured the forms of a republic, we have usually had 
a ruling oligarchy, or partisan machine representing 
by no means all the people, but rather a thoroughly 
bourgeois group holding the forces of the State 
to work their will. It is the same barbaric notion 
of the ultimate right of men to compel each other by 
force that survives in the prevalent worship of demo- 
cratic majorities. Thus it is commonly assumed, 
as in the late war, that a mere majority — very 
apt to be a noisy minority — by its weight of num- 
bers, may impose its will upon the rest of the people, 
may, for instance, drag a nation into war and com- 
mand unwilling millions to hold another people as 
their enemies. They may adopt a system of con- 
scription and force men to fight against their con- 
science or else suffer the penalties of criminals or 
traitors. What else is this than the inhuman heresy 
that "might makes right"? Not Kaisers nor the 
bourgeois alone hold this, but all men who think 



224 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

that the counting of votes entitles them to force a 
religion, a change of government, or an industrial 
system upon a nation, and in fact upon the world, 
before the peoples actually understand what is being 
done with them ! 

Against every use of force to compel men's wills 
the democratic ideal rises clear. Democracy is fun- 
damentally based on respect, not for the mere ani- 
mal man, but the moral or spiritual man, the thinker, 
the lover, the friend. This is no cheap assertion of 
the equality of mankind. Indeed only on the hu- 
man or spiritual level is there equality. It is the 
kind of equality with which a parent loves and re- 
spects his children. Beneath their differences lies 
the priceless common nature which all share. 

The line of demarkation falls at this point be- 
tween the old world and the new, between barbar- 
ism and civilization, between every kind of tyranny 
and the incoming spirit of democracy. On one side 
is the rule of force and the will to compel, and on 
the other side — not so much the rule as the co-op- 
eration of good wills acting together. The depen- 
dence henceforth is upon reason, persuasion, enlight- 
enment, a friendly attitude, such faith in other 
men's humanity as we wish others to show to us, 
and a prevailing good will toward all. No wonder 
that this kind of change seems at first like a mira- 
cle, and that men laugh at it. But no one can deny 
that it is the only possible evolutionary movement 
that befits our nature as men. Democracy is the 
way of the normal human life. Moreover, when 



DEMOCRATIC GOVERNMENT 225 

you have once introduced its leaven into human so- 
ciety, you have made the rule of force intolerable. 
You have installed an insatiable hunger and thirst 
after more and more complete democracy. Force, 
threats, compulsion, conscription, war are now 
doomed. 

Every home and school and club and labor union 
and State is feeling the pressure of this coming de- 
mocracy. Everywhere government changes its 
meaning. It is becoming an arrangement of mutual 
aid; we are asked to do together whatever makes 
for the benefit of all. The family is not now an 
aristocracy but a little commonwealth. The school 
is a training ground for a co-operative city or nation. 
The will of the leader, the parent, the teacher, the 
Governor or President or guiding committee, is sim- 
ply to help all to act for the welfare of all. So far 
as the use of force, for example, of the mother for 
the sake of the child, or the State over the feeble- 
minded, still inheres in every human institution, it is 
now subordinated to the main purpose — not the 
mere consent of the governed, obliged to obey, but 
the active and willing co-operation of the whole body, 
each unit taking its share in the common enterprise. 
Even the ideal of a Divine Government of the world 
changes now in the direction of a spiritual common- 
wealth of fellow citizens, in training to be friends 
and helpers wherever social beings live. The Al- 
mighty, we modestly conceive, wishes no conscripts 
or mercenaries ! He lays down no laws except such 
as are in his own nature, as they are in man. That 



226 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

is, he does always and as a matter of course, what 
we like to do at our best. He shows forth his good 
will, like his beauty. He compels no man to obey, 
except so far as the law of righteousness, being the 
way of life, is itself felt within us as a general and 
inevitable urgency to obey an ideal. 

Does not this view, however, border closely upon 
anarchy? Not at all. Where does respect for men 
breed discord and conflict? Where does good will 
stir men to rob and kill? Try it and see. It has 
even been made to work in prisons; it certainly 
works everywhere to put prisons out of commission 
and to make punishment a misnomer. 

The relation between the government with its 
claim of sovereignity and the individual citizen and 
his claim to freedom never becomes clear till we 
take the point of view of essential or spiritual de- 
mocracy. Even in the time of Ahab or Nero there 
was no question for a preacher of righteousness as 
to where the lines of obedience ran. The obedience 
due from a free soul, a Son of God, to truth or duty, 
carried precedence over every outward decree of 
the State. Sophocles' " Antigone " puts this splen- 
didly. What does the State itself exist for, except 
for the development and fulfillment of a fearless man- 
hood? One of the counts against war is that, in the 
chaos of arms, men and governments lose their sense 
of the meaning and value of manhood. They make 
a man a mere means, like a stick of dynamite, for 
securing the ends of the governing body. War de- 



DEMOCRATIC GOVERNMENT 227 

pends upon a pagan and imperialist conception of 
the State, whose sovereignty is by virtue of superior 
might. The Republic which proceeds on this claim 
is presently guilty of the same crimes and barbarities 
against the personality and freedom of its citizens 
which it blames in the autocratic ruler. The process 
is almost mysteriously subtle in debasing the public 
conscience. Multitudes become infected with the 
old notion that the State — their State — can do no 
wrong. Men come to believe that what the State 
decrees is therefore right. Dearly indeed must a 
State pay the cost of laying aside, not so much its 
written constitution, as the deeper principles which 
build all stable human institutions upon respect for 
the sacred nature of manhood. 

I wish especially to show the bearing of this teach- 
ing upon our thought of national and international 
government. The master anarchists of the world 
have not been the extreme individualists — generally 
a mild and kindly group — or a few desperate nihil- 
ists goaded to revolution under the whip of tyranny, 
or even a still fewer half-crazy bomb-throwers, but 
the great nations of Christendom. Keeping up the 
war system as a respectable institution, blessed by 
prayers and provided with chaplains, they have set 
the horrid example of destroying their enemies; 
they have invented the use of bombs and subma- 
rines and fighting aeroplanes. The war system is 
the everlasting foe of democracy — the denier of 
the rights of man and the constant menace to his 



228 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

liberties. The arming of men with murderous 
weapons makes a transformation in their nature and 
starts up every root of arrogance or cruelty in them. 
Dress a thousand men in uniform, give them rifles, 
make them march as one man, and they are not the 
same men as they were before. They have a des 
perate and bloody purpose ; they are thinking of ene 
mies; they are ready to believe lies of their neigh 
bor nations; they are fed on falsity and exaggera 
tions; they have become other than their best selves 
The noblest men suffer from the brutalizing poison 
It is not normal to hate; it is inhuman to kill; it is 
demoralizing to punish other men. All the great 
nations up to this date have been the anarchist forces 
of the world. They have incorporated the divisive 
war system into their constitution, defended its use, 
and done the least possible to put an end to it. No 
wonder that straight-thinking men have questioned 
whether the governmental people do not cost more 
than they are worth. And they — the real anarch- 
ists — have had the face to shoot their own citizens 
for the man-made crime of opposing war ! What 
governments have not been built on the pagan foun- 
dation of force and compulsion? 

It is no wonder that our own government fell into 
the bad company of the nations from whom it had 
recruited its population. It began by a war of re- 
bellion to establish its own independence. It put 
down its minority of loyalists with an iron hand and 
made their names odious. I speak in no blame. 
Few in that time knew any better way. We taught 



DEMOCRATIC GOVERNMENT 229 

generations of children to glory in the wars of pa- 
triotism. We waged an unrighteous war to acquire 
territory from our weaker neighbor, Mexico. Hav- 
ing taken over the doctrine that a nation must rely 
on might to get its will, having educated our young 
men at West Point to lead soldiers to battle, send- 
ing partisans to Congress, on one side to denounce 
the wickedness of slavery, and on the other side to 
threaten disunion, we fell irresistibly into the bloody 
struggle of the Civil War. 1 So little had we yet 
learned of co-operative democracy, and human re- 
spect! So far was the setting up of an external or 
a political machinery, called a Republic, from the 
understanding of thorough and humane democracy ! 
The old-world governments had always meddled 
with the affairs of their neighbors. America took 
over the habit. President Cleveland actually threat- 
ened the world with a war against England over 
a boundary dispute in a South American wilderness ! 
He tuned the fighting blood of the world to a quick- 
ened rate; henceforth we made louder call for fight- 
ing ships and every great and small power took 
notice. The Spanish War followed as if it had been 
an act in a drama. We know now how needless it 
was. The great Republic, joining the list of im- 
perial nations, with its new and distant dependen- 
cies, held by garrisons, now stirred the world with 
the fever of fighting and force. What nation must 

1 We did incidentally kill slavery, but we did not, and could not, 
establish the doctrine that a majority has the right to compel a State 
to remain in the Union against its decided will; and later President 
Roosevelt encouraged and took advantage of the right of secession 
in the case of Panama. 



230 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

not have more battleships now that America had 
set the new pace? See meanwhile what the United 
States had done with its resources from the begin- 
ning of the national government to the year 1908. 
Out of more than seventeen and a half billion dol- 
lars, it had spent for wars and the preparations for 
wars, and for vast war pensions twelve and a half 
of its billions, as against less than five billion dollars 
for everything else ! Neither do we here include 
the payment of interest upon debts whose only ex- 
cuse was war necessity. 

And now we all cry out at the horrors of a war 
of which every continent has shared the sufferings. 
Grant the inevitability with which we were dragged 
into the bloody maelstrom. The war was inevitable 
because We had prepared for it as all the nations had 
done, as a company of drinkers prepare themselves 
for an orgy, unable to put away the thirst in their 
veins. We had prepared for it in our thinking and 
our ideas about national honor and the need of 
might to keep right on the throne. In all our talk 
of the rights of the people we had never thought to 
provide for the popular decision of the most momen- 
tous act in the life of a nation. On the contrary we 
had loaded our chief executive with the autocratic 
functions and forces of the greatest of Kaisers in the 
face of war. By a word, by a blunder, he could set 
off the cannon and kill Mexican boys in Vera Cruz. 
Despite the sworn duty of legislators to serve the 
people, the tradition had grown that Congress must 
serve and support a President in the act of war. 



DEMOCRATIC GOVERNMENT 23 1 

The most splendid opportunity ever given to a 
man or to a nation was given in 19 14 to America to 
keep an open mind, to remain the constant friend 
of all the peoples, to use its immense leverage imme- 
diately upon the statesmen of the warring peoples, 
to keep the fire from spreading, to make this the last 
war, to use its treasures to save life rather than to 
kill. This could not be. The mind, the attitude, 
the spirit, the humanity, were lacking. We had not 
prepared for world peace. We were a nation of 
willing munition-makers. We allowed ourselves to 
grow rich while others went bankrupt. Shall it ever 
be so again? 

They used to say that no nation could endure 
" half slave and half free." It was true. We have 
put slavery away; a new and similar lesson comes 
to-day. A nation cannot stand, erected half on force 
and half on a democratic foundation. We have 
tried this experiment too long. The new issue is 
even more profound than was that over the exist- 
ence of slavery. The free and democratic nation 
is a grander construction than men have imagined. 
Read, for example, the Constitution of the United 
States. The thought embedded there is to " estab- 
lish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, provide for 
the common defence, promote the general welfare 
and secure the blessings of liberty." The emphasis 
here is protection from danger and relief from the 
fears that attended the chaotic old world — fear 
for the citizen's property, including his slaves; fear 
lest men, our own fellow citizens, might rise in re- 



232 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

bellion and destroy their own government; fear of 
other states north and south; fear of the Indians on 
the frontier; but especially fear at the hands of for- 
eigners, counting as foreign the very nations from 
which our people had come here, lest they attack 
us and subject us to alien rule. Thus " the more 
perfect union " was to provide strength for defence. 
What a wild world it seemed to our fathers ! It 
was only a little margin back to the days when the 
chief business of every little city was likewise to 
maintain walls and protect itself from bandits or 
pirates. We laid our national foundations mostly 
in barbarism and expended our substance in reliev- 
ing our fears. Our fears grew with our growth. 
We have lived to see billions of wealth and millions 
of precious lives lavished on this slave's work of 
protection. 

We laid a single corner-stone in our constitution 
toward our democratic ideal in writing, " to pro- 
mote the general welfare." What did we do in a 
hundred years for the general welfare? The na- 
tional government has carried the mails for us rather 
inefficiently, and with a growingly pernicious ten- 
dency to menace our liberties of intercourse and ex- 
pression. What else does it do to compare with 
what your city or town, despite all its waste, is do- 
ing daily for the general welfare, in its highways 
and schools and water supply, and a growing list of 
new and often most admirable services. Remove 
war and the fears of war and little remains for which 



DEMOCRATIC GOVERNMENT 233 

the service of the national government is strictly 
necessary. Is it strange that all governmental peo- 
ple are apt to shrink from giving up the militaristic 
officialism on which their own importance rests? 
Few of them see what a wide new field they might 
cultivate in promoting the general welfare. 

See now the trend of progress which, already con- 
spicuous in the growth of the city, is soon bound to 
overtake all kinds of government. No city to-day 
exists as it once did for the purpose of defence. A 
city keeps no armies. Old-world cities have made 
parks in place of their old battlements. The city 
has become a wonderful co-operative enterprise. 
There are no longer those who command while the 
others obey. All are partners. Even the police is 
coming to be a service for the public convenience; 
for example, to cultivate helpful relations with the 
boys and to befriend strangers. It is no armed 
guard to suppress the flames of disorder. Not by 
the presence of overwhelming force, but by the re- 
moval of various needless social causes of irritation, 
by the absence of menace and threats, and specially 
by the kindly attitude of all kinds and conditions of 
men toward one another, by the general disposition 
to do justice and to share in the increasing common 
wealth, we ensure domestic tranquillity and obtain 
freedom from the fear of enemies. Who are our 
enemies if we, the citizens, bear no enmity toward 
any one ? 

Now, this change in the basis and character of the 
city from the forced pressure of fear to the winsome- 



234 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

ness of mutual advantage is the first fruit and the 
prophecy of the incoming change in the aims and 
objects of every union of states. We are bound 
now to do fine work together which no state could 
do so well alone. Learning to put aside divisive 
jealousies between the several states, we need no 
longer to compel unwilling or reluctant states to re- 
main in the Union. That union is the most indi- 
visible where all are free to enjoy the common wel- 
fare. Surely we could never again wage civil war 
to compel a state to stay in the Union. On these 
terms what state desires to withdraw? 

As we have thus in our grand domain no need 
of protection from a sister state, nor of an armed 
guard, nor of a fortress, nor of a custom-house to 
distress the traveler, nor of a ship to police our 
shores, so are we coming by the same magnificent 
trend of progress to feel toward all the sister na- 
tions. We have no enmity toward any of them 
now and we have no fear, except so far as some of 
them continue to go armed. A Great Britain, a 
France, a Germany, a Japan, without a fortification, 
an army or a battleship constitutes no menace. 
Only the barbarism of armaments and the suspicions 
and fears that build up armaments constitute our 
common enemies. Already not a nation in the 
world fears or hates the United States, except as we 
present to them the terror of armies and navies. 
If the United States at the beginning had trusted in 
its democracy enough never to build a fort or keep 
a navy or set up War and Navy Departments, if 



DEMOCRATIC GOVERNMENT 235 

it had assumed that it would have no enemies and 
had never prepared against enemies, who shall say 
that the country would not have been freer and safer 
from actual danger and from the bondage of fear 
than it has ever been? Who would have attacked 
her if she had behaved justly toward all peoples, and 
cultivated friendship and civilization with them? 
Whereas, playing the role of a fighting nation, sus- 
pected to be willing to go to war over a quarrel in 
trade, or a boundary line, or to protect venturesome 
travelers in backward parts of the world, she has 
actually now become one of the possible greatest 
hindrances to the peace of the world. Her impe- 
rialism built on force is at variance with her democ- 
racy. Her out-grown Monroe Doctrine has become 
a source of increasing friction, misunderstanding, 
and jealousy. 

Question now the professed nationalism of our 
age and find how much good democracy it contains ! 
What is nationalism, and what is patriotism? We 
respect every spark of genuine human sentiment 
through which the spiritual nature in man shines. 
There is a patriotism which is wholesome and uni- 
tary. The city, the state, the nation, each is a de- 
partment of the grand common life of man. I be- 
long to my city or my state as to a larger family 
relationship. I inherit the traditions, the memo- 
ries, the history, the ideals of this fellowship. I 
share in its duties, its responsibilities, its debts and 
obligations, its honor and its dishonor, its achieve- 



236 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

ments and its failures. I am bound to do what I 
can for its advancement. I owe due regard to its 
feeblest and neediest members. If there is beauti- 
ful scenery, if there has been heroic color in the his- 
tory, if there have been generous and public-spirited 
people, I have a happy satisfaction in such facts. 
This holds true of every little town. It is good 
for a child to have had a birthplace for which he 
is glad. It is likewise good to have a rational sen- 
timent of loyalty toward each larger civic unit, to the 
state and the nation, of which we are members and 
to which we owe obligations in co-operation with 
other men and women. We should like to have 
people feel such honorable sentiments in every city 
or nation in the world. The more of such senti- 
ment, of notable memories and civic duties, the 
richer the world is. This rational patriotism is 
based in human respect, in admiration for worthy 
human accomplishments, in reverence for common 
human ideals. There is no item of divisiveness in 
it. As with excellent athletes or good scholars, so 
there may be millions of sensible patriots; the 
more there are, the better off we all are. The more 
flourishing, happy, civilized nations there are, the 
better for all of us. Good internationalism is the 
fruit of such enlightened and large-hearted patriot- 
ism; it learns its business and cultivates its proper 
spirit in the smaller field on its way to take part in 
the achievements of world order. 

I have said a " rational " patriotism as distin- 
guished from a hectic, hysterical and barbarous kind. 



DEMOCRATIC GOVERNMENT 237 

I protest against confounding patriotism with the 
animal instinct to stand with your own crowd in a 
fight. The difference here is much the same as holds 
good between fanaticism and real religion. The 
fanatic thinks his religion the only one; having no 
understanding of other men's thought, he would like 
to compel them to join his sect. Desolating reli- 
gious wars arose out of this perverted sectarianism; 
it was a disease of the human spirit. The same 
type of narrowness, the same contempt of others, 
the same swelling of national pride, worst of all, the 
sectarian will to compel others, even to " enforce 
peace " upon them, characterizes a large part of the 
patriotism of the world. It is divisive, irrational, 
hateful; it is easily provoked; it thinks evil and ex- 
pects it; it makes a hero of every one dressed in 
khaki. Every new war gives it fresh growth and 
feeds it with new fears. This fanatical patriotism 
is the enemy of mankind. Not " German militar- 
ism " alone needs to be put out of the world; our 
American militarism may be a worse curse to us; 
with its heathen cry of the " big stick " and its 

II force, force, force," it seeks to compel our young 
lads to think the homicidal thoughts of a soldier. 
So much for two opposite kinds of nationalism : one 
of them selfish, fanatical and autocratic; the other 
the virile child of the spirit, humane and democratic. 

With this distinction in mind we can see what a 
bona fide League of Nations would be. We imme- 
diately discover two almost diametrically opposite 



238 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

proposals for a World League. The United States 
is perhaps the loudest of all in its urgency for a 
League of Force. The truth is that the United 
States is the home of a most subtle and solidly ar- 
rayed group of Bourbon conservatives, distrustful 
of all wisdom but their own, most timid of impend- 
ing changes toward a more humane order of gov- 
ernment and industry. They have not yet the se- 
cret of a religion that will renew men's faith and 
courage. Thus, most distinguished men in church 
and state do not expect to put war away from the 
world. They will not advise the nations to 
" scrap " their forts and battleships ! They are 
looking on with complacency at the building of a big 
navy; they are boastful of the success of conscrip- 
tion; they go beyond our English cousins in their 
willingness to saddle our public school education 
with a Prussian system of military training. Beside 
the armed forces which each nation is still to carry 
on the back of its people — purely for domestic need, 
we suppose — they serve notice of their willingness 
to entrust the new League with a large enough force 
to compel the nations in it to behave themselves. 
What is this but militarism and the expectation of 
war? What is the animus behind it but the old 
fear, distrust, jealousy, narrowness, ready to blaze 
up into hatred — the same inhuman material for 
war with which the world has been cursed for thou- 
sands of years ! The force is more nicely gloved, 
but it is the same instrument of tyranny over the 
souls of men. Fortunately, this project is not likely 



DEMOCRATIC GOVERNMENT 239 

to be carried out. Wholesale disarmament would 
probably be easier to accomplish. Suppose our 
fathers had recommended a standing army to " en- 
force peace" between the newly united colonies! 
Would they ever have come together under this 
menace of a threat? 

Is it not evident that the great democratic trend 
of the world toward humanity and civilization runs 
in the opposite way? It comes in inescapably as if 
from the sources of being and power. It cannot 
go back. Let us be bold enough to face all that it 
requires. Our fathers acted thus boldly when they 
founded a nation of many states. They put away 
tariffs and trade jealousies; they allowed no fortified 
boundaries ; they trusted every state, great or small, 
to defer to the judgment of the supreme national 
court, with no armed sheriff to press the claim. 
True, they built partly on the sands, but they show 
us all the better where to lay the foundation of a 
true League of Nations. For fundamentally our 
Union was made possible and has endured, out of 
good will and out of a general public opinion grow- 
ing on the whole in favor of justice and humanity. 
What we would not do under compulsion, we can 
do as soon as we trust one another and when we are 
free by peaceable means to correct any serious in- 
justice. 

We founded our national Union mainly because 
we wanted protection and defence; in a less degree, 
only, for the sake of the general welfare. We had 
little imagination to foresee the notable co-operative 



240 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

undertakings which are now coming to light. For 
what end do we desire or need a League of Na- 
tions? The chief idea is that which was only inci- 
dental to the founders of the American nation — 
namely, the provision of a permanent court to which 
all differences between the nations of the world may 
be hopefully brought. We have the beginning of 
this court already at The Hague. We do not even 
need a League to be enabled to use it. Do we need 
anything more to use it than a treaty agreement 
between the various nations, such as President Wil- 
son's administration has already made with a con- 
siderable number of the most important Powers? 
The one requisite is the will and the public opinion 
of nations to use the court. Is the United States 
ready to contribute this needful will to use the court 
rather than force, for example, in a case between 
herself and a South or Central American State? 
If she has not the will to do so little a thing, would 
she accept a compulsory court decision against her- 
self? 

But we still need protection. We want the free- 
dom of the seas. What we really mean is not free- 
dom from the raids of pirates, but from sea wars 
waged by just such nations as we are, and with the 
same hideous ships. Scuttle every warship, as we 
have substantially done on the Great Lakes, and we 
should all, great and small, enjoy perfect freedom 
of the seas. Do we need a League to make the 
seas free and safe for the world? No, England 
and the United States could effect this by the simple 



DEMOCRATIC GOVERNMENT 24 1 

act of disarmament. Who would not join them? 
No republic wants a navy in a world of republics. 
The safest of nations for forty years have been Hol- 
land and the small Scandinavian States, each with 
a large commerce and tiny sea-power. Take the 
fearsome warships from the seas, open plenty of 
ports to unrestricted commerce, and you will have 
removed the major causes of friction and, at the 
same time, instead of making the ocean an easy 
means of attack, you will have made it a powerful 
preventive and defence against war. 

We desire every new bond expressing interna- 
tional good will and directed for the common wel- 
fare. We have seen within a generation a most 
hopeful growth of conferences, congresses and un- 
ions among the nations — for closer postal rela- 
tions, for collecting and disseminating information 
about the products of the agriculture of all coun- 
tries *, for science and education. All these fre- 
quent meetings constitute a long list of natural 
forms of alliance. These conferences only need to 
acquire a firmer rootage and extension and proper 
correlation to put an end to war. Should not the 
League of Nations grow on such lines? Should it 
not be flexible and simple in its organization and 
most free and open in its membership ? What need 
has it of a governing power, for a few to command 
the rest? Its success depends upon the absence of 

1 The International Institute of Agriculture at Rome, founded 
at the suggestion of an American, David Lubin. 



242 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

force, upon the greatest possible use of publicity and 
discussion, upon an enlightened understanding and 
a humane public opinion. 

The somewhat cumbrous and inelastic organiza- 
tion of the United States came mostly out of the 
old-world ideals of a government meant for defence. 
The bigness of a nation is of only the slightest con- 
sequence in a civilized world. Indeed the most use- 
ful States have often been small. There is nothing 
sacred in boundary lines. We do not love our coun- 
try more by reason of the addition of Alaska. We 
should love it no less if it proved convenient for 
Porto Rico to be joined in a federation with the 
Spanish-speaking republic of Cuba. So far as our 
original Union made no provision for the with- 
drawal of a state, this was in deference to no ra- 
tional principle : our fathers doubtless wished to be 
able to mass their forces in the event of war. But 
nothing can be so undemocratic as to force indi- 
viduals or a State to remain in any Union, political 
or ecclesiastical, if the people deliberately and after 
due process of discussion wish to go out. So with 
our League of Nations. If it can offer good reasons 
for the peoples to join it, if it has continental rail- 
ways to construct, or grand tunnels to connect us 
more closely, which no nation could finance alone, if 
it shall mean a common coinage and currency, with 
mails and telephone lines to make the world more 
neighborly, if it promises to forbid famine and 
plague and to remove the causes that create poverty 
and disease, let us have such a league. But let us 



DEMOCRATIC GOVERNMENT 243 

beware how we are led by imperialistic zeal to cre- 
ate a league of tyranny and force, whether labeled 
an Empire or a Republic. 

The fact is, we have just come to the point in 
human history where we may see how to steer the 
way of mankind toward the happier shores of a real 
civilization. In a barbarous, purposeless world 
there is nothing to do but drift. But this is not 
a purposeless world. A deep and significant move- 
ment ever guides us on and upwards. There has 
always been an eternal thought urging us. We are 
coming to share the stirring thought, to enter into 
the costly and beautiful civilizing purpose, to become 
share-holders and co-workers with God, and so to 
hope immeasurably to hasten the movement. We 
are here to add our willing minds to the Good 
Will of the Universe. This ideal once seen makes 
us all brothers. Herein is the supreme reason why 
we cannot abide war; we protest against it on every 
occasion. Wherever it breaks out with its blinding 
suspicion and hatred it vitiates the life of democracy. 
The steersman's eyes are confused. 



VI 

THE GOSPEL OF PERCENTAGES 

Say what we will of the commanding supremacy of 
the ideal things, there comes at times, to many 
minds at least, the reflex of a cold wave of doubt. 
Few are exempt from this ebb and flow of the tides 
of life, spiritual as well as physical. I wish to bring 
to our aid against these falling tides of emotional 
confidence certain considerations which dispose the 
mind anew to its normal optimistic direction. I say 
optimistic advisedly, because our religion is frankly 
a religion of ineradicable hope. A man is not his 
whole or best self without hope in his eyes. No 
man can do his best work without enthusiasm. Let 
us not be ashamed to be optimists, provided we are 
serious-minded in our devotion to truth. 

The doctrine of percentages is not a dry study of 
figures. It is a simple deduction from all kinds of 
practical experiences. Let me illustrate what I 
wish to set forth. I sit and write on a dreary win- 
ter day. Fog and dampness are about me. I can- 
not see beyond a narrow horizon. How much of 
the area of the country is under the clouds? Prob- 
ably only a small percentage : possibly the sun shines 
forty miles inland. The climate of my city has on 
the average but a small percentage of really bad 

244 



THE GOSPEL OF PERCENTAGES 245 

weather. Now this is a parable. You can apply 
it in almost any black time and reach the same gen- 
eral conclusions. We suffer moods of darkness over 
the wickedness about us. Is it possible that whole 
nations or races may give way to an epidemic of in- 
human unscrupulousness ? *• In my haste," says an 
old writer, " I said all men are liars." But wait. 
What are the facts, for example, that account for 
the Great War? The conditions were not in any 
way so desperate as most people suppose. Only a 
small percentage of the guiltiest nation were hope- 
lessly unscrupulous and irrational. If five years ago 
we could have subtracted fewer than a hundred 
noisy, egotistic, wrong-headed, half-crazy but de- 
termined persons, statesmen, potentates, essayists, 
philosophers, the Kaiser type, the Clemenceau type, 
the horrid tragedy would not have been provoked. 
It is the few, as a rule, who set mischief in motion. 

It is the same on a small scale in the scope of 
common experience as in the great crises of history. 
What makes the toughest boys' school bad? It 
may be one man; the master happens to be self- 
willed and unsympathetic. Perhaps a very few boys 
give the school its reputation. Remove five or ten 
of them and you would cure the misrule. So with 
the mob which lynches a helpless negro. Send away 
a half dozen men or cool their temper, and no mob 
would gather! 

It is marvelous how the course of history might 
have been altered by the withdrawal of a tiny per- 
centage of inordinately unscrupulous men. What if 



246 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

Hannibal or Alexander or Julius Caesar or Tam- 
erlane or Napolean or Bismarck had never been 
born! It looks as if a little minority has been re- 
sponsible for a large part of all the evil that has 
been committed on the earth! 

Note now another fact that works to the discom- 
fiture of the bad. Not only are the desperately mis- 
chievous personages extremely few, but they almost 
never come together. They cannot propagate their 
kind; their very presence tends by a reaction of 
horror to waken into life resilient moral antitoxins 
to limit their evil. In general, we may say that 
what we see at its worst, and when we are unhap- 
piest and most pessimistic, reduced to its propor- 
tions, is found never to be so bad as it seems. It is 
not so prevalent, so long continued, or so mortally 
hurtful. This is in the nature of things, because 
there is nothing infinite in evil; it runs its course 
and fails ; every particular form of it is self-destruc- 
tive; it has nothing but a derived life. 

Turn now to the other end of the scale and see 
what is going on, or liable at any moment to hap- 
pen, where the little percentage of the good powers 
is shown. Grant that this percentage at any time 
or place at present seems small. But how immeas- 
urably active and irresistible it is! It has been 
said that there are many " fairly honest men, but ex- 
tremely few men who are scrupulously honest." 
Yet one such man lifts the standards of conduct 
around him for all coming time ! Here in the realm 
of spiritual forces the infinite life is at work. There 



THE GOSPEL OF PERCENTAGES 247 

is contrast with the bad or you would not know the 
good, but there is no comparison of power. The 
work of construction is positive; a glint of it is sig- 
nificant and prophetic of the coming of more of the 
same, or of better. 

The old story of Sodom is a pertinent parable. 
If Abraham could find as many as ten upright men 
in the city, the ten could save it: not by favor of the 
Almighty, but by virtue of the common human na- 
ture which only needed a few true and brave men to 
rally against the orgy of corruption into which the 
town had fallen. 



SECTION V 

THE RELIGION WITHIN 

I 

RELIGION AS AN EXPERIENCE 

I HAVE wished to demonstrate all through this book 
that religion in its supreme thoughts and ideas is 
democratic and universal. I wish now to show that 
its most exalted moods and most precious experi- 
ences are open, like the sight of the stars, to every 
one. The greatest spiritual teachers, the prophets, 
Jesus and Paul, Wesley and Channing, have always 
said this. In ages of barbarism the religion of 
Jesus, as distinguished from the religion of the 
church, was especially that of men who broke 
through the conventions of the priests and the Phar- 
isees into " the holy of holies." 

The day of the coming democracy, when each man 
shall count not as a mere vote but as a man, makes 
its call for a broader church than ever yet was — 
not the church of any one name or founder, though 
he might be the greatest and best, not the church of 
any race or nation, but the open church of humanity 
— another name for divinity, reality, unity and all 
ideal and beautiful things. This is the church of 

249 



250 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

the spirit and of all souls, to which every man of 
good will now belongs. Visible walls or buildings 
do not make it. The peoples of every race and 
language already begin to find themselves and to 
find one another in it as fast as they know justice, 
truth, integrity, and kindness. 

What now, in this broadest sense of the word, is 
religion or a religious experience? Let us answer 
this first in the simplest and, at the same time, the 
most splendid and universal way. Put yourself 
back in your childhood and see what marvelous 
process was going on in you. You were being 
played upon by all sorts of agencies; continual action 
and reaction were building you up into manhood. 
Both outside and within invisible forces were at 
work upon your body and even more subtly upon 
yourself — the invisible spiritual being, always un- 
deniably there, but most difficult of all things to 
describe. You looked up to the stars and the sky 
and caught the conception of space, and of space 
beyond spaces immeasurable, of aeons of time, and 
of time extending backward and forward forever. 
You touched and heard and saw and wondered at 
the realm of beauty in the gardens and the trees; 
you touched life like your life and began to learn 
its various languages of sign and tone and changing 
face, as well as speech. You entered into a heritage 
of words, thoughts, ideals, duties, responsibilities, 
binding your little life with many millions on the 
earth, with myriads before your time, their deeds, 
their varied cities, their poems and psalms, their 



RELIGION AS AN EXPERIENCE 25 1 

hopes ; binding you also with myriads to come who 
might be better or worse, happier or poorer, for 
the conduct of your life and that of your comrades. 

You, the self, the growing man from childhood 
up, were at each moment what this play of forces, 
physical, human, moral, social, spiritual, made you 
as you reacted upon it all. What did you ever do, 
except to answer to it by whatever was within you? 
How did that kernel of selfhood within yourself 
come to be? What did you ever create, or invent, 
or initiate, except at the instance of the building cre- 
ative life forces? 

Now imagine the highest and most complete type 
of man; imagine what you would like best to attain 
to, in the most exalted flight of your idealizing in- 
telligence. Do not even look back for any suffi- 
cient example in the past; be content with nothing 
less than the maximum ideal, well-made in body, ex- 
cellently equipped in mind, clear-sighted, skillful, 
wise, just, true-hearted, lovable. It will not be so 
very different from actual men and women whom 
some of us have known. Where, pray, do such men 
come from? They do not make themselves. They 
are the creation of the universe life wherever any 
" mere man " really answers back at his very best 
to the impress of the shaping fingers of the one 
creative life. 

I call this whole series of impressions both from 
without and within, through the net effect of which, 
the man comes up into the most complete realiza- 
tion of himself as a thinking, dutiful, friendly, just, 



252 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

generous, useful and helpful man — both a free in- 
dividual and a social being — the experience of re- 
ligion. Scougal, a Scotch writer, long ago defined 
religion as " the life of God in the soul of men." 
He meant, I think, something like what we mean 
here. Call the creating universe life by the familiar 
name of God. This linked series of upward-moving 
influences, all going to make an all-round man, hold- 
ing at his heart everything needful to constitute a 
divine being, would be the conversation, as it were, 
between God and the man. Every impress of the 
beauty and integrity of the universe on the growing 
integrity of the man would be an experience of re- 
ligion. Could you imagine any teaching more ef- 
fectively worthy of a divine mind whereby to endow 
his child with light and satisfaction? Anyway, 
whatever you like to call it, here are the facts — a 
continuous series of impressions — all in their united 
effect bringing to pass the most perfectly beautiful 
specimen of the fruitage of the universe ! You can- 
not possibly think ill of the world that does such 
work as this. 

Now this is the normal development of the school 
of life. It is precisely what ought to be measurably 
effected in all men. We call no man a failure who 
responds at all to this type or norm. We call no 
life a success which fails to respond to it. 

I am speaking, however, with respect to evolution. 
I am looking forward, therefore, rather than look- 
ing back. I care nothing for those who say that 
human nature has never changed and cannot be 



RELIGION AS AN EXPERIENCE 253 

changed. I am not moved by those who say that 
mankind has fought battles for ten thousand years 
and will always fight. To say such things is neither 
to be a good evolutionist, nor to note the facts of 
human nature. Human nature normally passes 
through phases and changes; it wants to put forth 
not only exuberant stock and leafage, but to bring 
its choice fruit to ripeness. You may thus know 
more of its nature, of what it is capable of doing, 
of what its next coming phase of development will 
be like, through the biographies of the best typical 
men and women of the past hundred years than you 
could know from the annals of twenty thousand 
years of barbarism, or from all the biological labora- 
tories of the world. 

As with the physical side of the vast evolutionary 
movement, so with its spiritual side. There are 
times and seasons. We are not saying that when 
the first poet of the " coming people " foresaw that 
the day would dawn when the spirit of God " would 
be poured out on all flesh," the day had then 
dawned. We are not saying that you could have 
brought in a genuine rule of the people by an edict 
of Julius Caesar. We simply say that the signs mul- 
tiply to-day toward these and other great spiritual 
events, as the signs of land multiplied before Colum- 
bus' little ships as they approached the undiscovered 
islands. This means that ventures in the faith of 
the coming freedom are safer and surer before our 
feet than they ever were before. Grant that what 
we long for — the reality and the unity of religion, 



254 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

the gladness of religion for the average man, the 
fellowship of men in a common task, the harmony 
of all races as heirs of the ages — was never 
possible before, that civilization could not be before 
the times were ripe. I urge that the age of the 
spirit is here, that good will can do what we need; 
better yet, that it is already doing its work wherever 
the spiritual atmosphere has become clear enough to 
permit the waves of the eternal light to shine 
through and act upon the roots of goodness waiting 
in every man. Already every impulse counts for 
its full value; gleams of beauty, works of worthy 
art, the appeal of music, memories of good men, 
the safeguarding thought or presence of generous 
womanhood, every story of sturdy honesty or faith- 
fulness, moments of wide-awake action at the sacri- 
fice of self-indulgence, conversations with high- 
minded friends, the very sight of pure and lovable 
people — what are these but the contact and expe- 
rience of religion? Through all of them comes 
the impelling presence of the one divine life. Is 
the hearing a sermon or a psalm religious, and is not 
every movement of life also religious, which stirs 
resolution, sharpens conscience, adds courage, opens 
the doors of hope, or sends us forth on errands of 
friendship? Whatever enters into the molding 
and the fulfillment of the ideal or spiritual life in 
any man is an experience of religion. As surely 
as God is at all, this is God in us. Who can live 
or move or have his being without this inspiring, 
upbuilding life? 



RELIGION AS AN EXPERIENCE 255 

But some one says: " We thought that religion 
had to do with worship and prayers and with what 
is coming after death." Is it not a strange fact that 
Jesus, whom hundreds of millions of people worship 
as God, has so little to say about the worship of 
God? We do not know that he thought it neces- 
sary to go up to the temple at all, but he has very 
clear teachings about the conditions which foster 
worship. A man who brings a quarrel with his 
brother to the altar, Jesus says, cannot worship God 
till he has settled his quarrel. This is to say that 
a man must compose his own mind and become 
friendly before he can worship. In fact, this 
change of mind is itself the best kind of worship. 
To be friendly is to be worshipful; it is to be in and 
with God. Jesus also teaches that no one can wor- 
ship who brings his pride into his church, thanking 
God that he is holier than his neighbor. What 
would Jesus, the lover of men, say to churches 
crowded with " Christians " praying for victory 
over enemy Christians ! Would he not call a mora- 
torium over all such worship while Christians kept 
up their war? 

We have no idea of an emperor God on his throne 
desiring praise and obeisance. No good human fa- 
ther wishes an oriental obsequiousness in his children. 
He desires their sympathy, their fellowship and 
their intelligent understanding, their appreciation of 
his thoughts and plans, their cheerful co-operation in 
the work closest to his heart. That they should 
say: How can we help you? is " worship." So with 



256 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

the worship of God. " God is spirit and they that 
worship him must worship in spirit and in truth." 
That is, as the great cable carries the infinite power 
of good will, so the little wires, whether single or 
gathered on occasion in great coils, shall carry their 
full capacity of the moving power. To think pure 
thoughts is worship, to love is worship, to serve for 
love's sake is worship. Does the church quicken 
great thoughts ? Then it helps worship. Whatever 
brings to a man the sense of the presence of the 
good life of the world helps toward worship. 
What do you do at your best? This is worship; 
that is, you are then with God. You let the selfish 
will go, you own up to your faults, you open your 
heart to pity and sympathy, you veto meanness and 
anger. Surely you are with God and God is in and 
with you, when you thus share his life and his work. 
" Whosoever loveth is born of God." Where love 
is, there God is. When will men learn these simple 
things which make us all great! When will 
churches and temples be so wholly consecrated to 
these ideas that harsh and selfish men and women 
shall be ashamed to bring their impure and un- 
brotherly selves within the doors, and shall go away 
possessed by the new spirit! 

What shall we say about prayer? Can there be 
prayer in a reasonable religion? In the best and 
only real sense, yes. The thought of evolution and 
its multiform bearings, of the processes of the guid- 
ing and creative universe life as natural and orderly, 



RELIGION AS AN EXPERIENCE 257 

though none the less infinitely marvelous, the idea 
of the universal law as dynamic and vital rather 
than static or fixed — this Copernican change of 
base, entering all human and spiritual relations, al- 
ters the meaning of every traditional word or defini- 
tion. In many cases we need new words to express 
ourselves ; it takes too much time to fit the old words 
to our purpose. Prayer is such a word. We are 
not thinking of it to-day as the primitive peoples, 
like little children, thought of it, as a kind of magic 
to change or bend the will of a changeable God to 
do their bidding, to destroy their enemies, to work 
miracles and save them the trouble of honest toil. 
A grander, nobler idea of deity forbids this. Who 
are we in the face of this vast, complex universe to 
dictate our wishes or venture to alter its normal 
processes? How do we know what is wise and 
good for our own welfare, or for the welfare of 
mankind? 

The old notion of the magic power in petitions, 
of being heard for our " much speaking " passes 
away in a larger conception. It is like the young 
child's thought of his father as an easy mark for 
his eager importunity, which grows up at length 
into a respect and a reasonableness that at last 
never thinks of asking favors. Is not this later 
growth of the grown child's mind toward the parent 
already gaining a closeness, an intimacy, a dearness, 
a trust, a sense of communion, that never were be- 
fore? In this sense prayer is the closest relation 
between man at his best and the spirit of the uni- 



258 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

verse. This is a fact in the nature of religion. It 
is a mood of inward rest and harmony, of confi- 
dence and hope free of fears, of good will awaiting 
the monitions of a higher will, in which the whole 
movement of life is summed up in the great words : 
M Thy Kingdom — or Commonwealth — come : thy 
will — that is, the Great Good Will — be done." 
This is the substance of what prayer is at its best. 
It is doubtless in this sense in which Dr. Charles W. 
Eliot has said that it is the " highest effort of the 
human intelligence." The man in the fullest exer- 
cise of his integrity as a man, ready for life or death, 
reflects and answers back to the integrity of the uni- 
verse. The world is now no material aggregate of 
phenomena, but rather a spiritual unity. The phe- 
nomenal world and its history are a vast series of 
parables and lessons of the ideal facts, laws, and life 
of the spiritual reality. 

I am describing actual experiences and no mere 
imagination. I wish to cover especially those cases 
which rise to what man has been accustomed to recog- 
nize as conscious communion with God. In these mo- 
ments of a heightened life, the whole man is awake: 
nothing in him is dormant. In the truth-loving man 
even the critical intelligence also is awake and on its 
guard against both illusion and conceit. Is there 
anything irrational in the fact that a man may be 
at his best as a spiritual being without the slightest 
damage of body or mind? If the word mystical 
had not been used for grotesque and weird expe- 
riences, I should like to call the state of which we 



RELIGION AS AN EXPERIENCE 259 

are speaking " ethical mysticism." Call it if you 
will " ethical religion," so as to make clear where 
its emphasis lies. There is an essential unity of 
body and mind. The self is there in the attitude of 
a good or friendly self, its will bent on the service 
of mankind — that reasonable and actual service 
in which each man desires for every man the best 
that he has himself. Out of this good will and ac- 
companying it grow peace, contentment, courage, 
trust in the right, and cheerful optimism. The man 
is at his best for every kind of useful exercise of all 
his faculties. Who would not desire this? 

Assuming the spirit of the universe to be the most 
real of facts, such an experience as this is what you 
might well expect. What higher gift could it be- 
stow? Dreams and visions could not be so satisfy- 
ing. It is not as if you were lifting yourself and 
creating the ideas — truth, right, duty, infinite fel- 
lowship — but rather as if all these splendid 
thoughts were impressed upon you; as if you were 
lifted by a power more than yourself; as if the mes- 
sages of faith, hope and love, were being whispered 
to you through every article of beauty and every 
gleam of loving eyes around you. It is as if the uni- 
verse were behaving toward you as a real spiritual 
universe ought to behave. 

Man at his best is another and superior kind 
of force, as compared with himself on the low 
level of his selfishness. He can see things that he 
did not see before, and command subtle powers 
of tact, sagacity and common sense that the selfish 



260 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

man did not possess. It is as if, instead of laying 
down his own tiny plans before the Eternal Mind 
and begging to be helped to carry them out, he were 
listening, as a man awaits, modestly and diligently, 
the commands of his leader, to be shown what is 
best to do. It is as if he brought his hopes and anx- 
ieties and dearest longings for his children, his 
friends, his countrymen, and in the quiet mood of 
one who wishes nothing so much as the highest wel- 
fare of spiritual beings, finds the insight to help 
them. It is as if the whole world were linked and 
hinged together for the ultimate accomplishment of 
the men of good will, and in this watchtower of 
the spirit he sees how to touch new springs of ac- 
tion and avail himself of the munitions of goodness, 
wherever stored. Do not dream but that something 
new or wonderful may and does evolve from this 
kind of communion wherein the soul of man beats 
in unison with all good souls and draws resources 
needful from the springs of life. 

Put this, if you will, into practical form. Pious 
forefathers began the day with prayer. Grant that 
you can never do as they did. How do you begin 
your day better than they did? Suppose you rush, 
as most men do, into the business of the day with 
casual mind, self-centered, purposeless, unquiet or 
irritable. Do you not see that you are a different 
man and destined inevitably to a different day, to 
feebler and less worthy accomplishment, to acts 
closer to the danger lines of injustice, than if you 
took a moment at the start of the day to set the 



RELIGION AS AN EXPERIENCE 26 1 

tune of your life with the music of all goodness and 
beauty? Will not your whole household be a differ- 
ent family group, wiser, calmer, more effective, if 
you and they hear a psalm or hymn of trust, or a 
few noble words of friendly thought, than if they 
each tear apart from the rest bent upon their own 
pleasure or gain? Will not a nation of households, 
accustomed to frequent hours of social refreshment 
in planning improved modes of human action and re- 
newing the grand purposes of life, be a happier, 
wiser and more democratic people than any equal 
multitude of anxious, feverish, greedy men and 
women who never meet each other except for amuse- 
ment or in their exclusive clubs and unions? What 
indeed does the world need so much as that whole- 
some and uplifting spirit, which is at once the wor- 
ship of God and an act in the service of man! 



II 

WHY WE SAY GOD 

I have been chary in using the word God. Instead 
of beginning with the old-fashioned assumption of 
God, I have- found it necessary to begin at the other 
end and to find what the near and verifiable facts 
are which lie back of the assumption. This is the 
method of all good science: it is the method of the 
lovers of truth. Moreover, it is good for our mod- 
esty now and then, in thinking upon the most tre- 
mendous questions that man asks, to drop every 
easy assumption and to insist that we think out what 
our words mean. We have all heard the name of 
God spoken in an inert, wholly empty and conven- 
tional manner. No wonder if many honest minds 
are shy of it. 

I have found it almost impossible, however, not 
to use the word God. Words at best are only con- 
venient as tools or symbols to express ideas. No 
word can be big or exact enough to satisfy us. The 
word electricity is a good illustration of this. It 
stands for a marvelous invisible reality of power, 
but the bare word does not in the least tell anyone 
what this power is. So with the word God. We 
must have some symbol to stand for the Power, or 
Life, or whatever unknown mystery it is, which is 

262 



WHY WE SAY GOD 263 

behind all things. We cannot always be saying the 
Unknowable or Nature. Any and every word is 
only provisional and conceals the beginning of an 
assumption. Is not the assumption of the idea of 
God a sort of necessity of thought? 

The fact is that we know more than we think. 
Certain great words and ideas are alive in us and 
fill the literature of the world. Power, Will, 
Beauty, Mind, Purpose, Integrity, Goodness, the 
Universe, Life — each and all of them are assump- 
tions of knowable reality; they spring out of a world 
of experience in which we have shared. Every one 
of them flames up into view from its invisible 
source toward heights of infinity. Try to keep 
them inside bounds and limits, if you want to see 
why we have to add the word Infinite to them. You 
can make a child understand the difference between 
limited and infinite power. If you think, be bold 
in your thinking, as those who expect to find some- 
thing worth while. 

In an earlier chapter we set forth well-known 
facts of experience which impress us with the idea 
of a spiritual universe. To say Righteousness with 
Huxley, or Truth, Beauty and Goodness with 
Haeckel, is to enter the gate of this realm of the 
spirit. True men always confess that here is the 
deepest reality we know. God is our word to cover 
it. To say with the children " Mother Nature," to 
describe how just she is, how nothing can cheat her 
or escape her sight or despise her laws, is another 
picture method of saying what the bottommost real- 



264 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

ity is. To say " The Father in Heaven " is a para- 
ble of the " Eternal Goodness." 

In short, we do the same thing in the realm of 
the spirit, with the facts of the spirit, that we do 
with the world of matter and visible things. We 
take a word to cover the mysterious substance of 
which our bodies are made, and the stars likewise. 
Who knows what it is? It is more elusive, the more 
you seek to put your scientific finger upon it. It 
may be force or will. It may indeed, for aught 
we know, be a form of spirit. But for practical 
purposes and the uses of thinking, it is a reality, 
and seems in its innumerable shapes and colors 
to be but one in essence. Whatever it is, you 
cannot get rid of it, or make believe that it has 
no existence, or break its ruling laws. Is it mere ir- 
rational assumption that we talk thus of matter? 
We think not. It is no more irrational when we 
say: "We believe in God." We cannot con- 
veniently and successfully think in either case with- 
out this assumption. 

The great question is not whether reality, or God, 
exists, but rather, what kind of reality, or God, is 
it? Is it — or He — good? Does it make any 
difference to us whether " He " exists or not? In 
any real sense, does He care for the tiny creatures of 
the dust? Is approach or communion with Him 
possible? These are the questions of religion. 
Many men to-day are in trouble about them, and 
others are indifferent to them, as if they had made 



WHY WE SAY GOD 265 

up their minds to the negative side without think- 
ing at all! 

We talk about mind and goodness and justice and 
purpose in the world. What depths there are be- 
neath these words ! Can any one conceive of ab- 
stract justice or goodness, or blind and impersonal 
purpose? Every one of these words helps to de- 
scribe life; they are unreal as a corpse unless we 
ascribe life to them. They are all personal words. 
I mean personal not in the small sense of limited be- 
ing, but in the large sense of that which lives and 
thinks and feels and cares and loves; which is one, 
however infinite it is in its forms. How can good- 
ness or a purpose exist except in a person? We 
men, besides the little finite person, through which 
we are seen and heard, carry along something of the 
idea or image of a greater person, the best self, the 
real and infinite person in ourselves, in which we 
share life with other men and with the vaster life or 
person, the soul of reality, at the heart of things, 
from whom our lives spring. In one sense of the 
word person we mean that in which we differ from 
every other person. In a deeper sense we mean 
that in which we are one with every person. 

The utter dependence of our lives upon the un- 
known creative source is one of the most startling 
of all facts. If one thing is certain it is that we do 
not account for ourselves, and least of all, for those 
things in us that make us men — our minds, our 
hearts, our highest purpose. The noblest men never 
made themselves and cannot account for themselves, 



266 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

except in dependence upon some higher power. 
They go back into the unknown reality of spirit for 
all that they are. At their best, they have watched, 
studied, asked questions, listened for monitions and 
warnings, caught ideas handed over to them, wit- 
nessed visions, taken on the motion and momentum 
of a purpose not their own, till they have discovered 
it and possessed themselves with a love and good 
will upon which they have rested as eternal and in- 
finite. If this ray of life or person in the highest 
forms in which we know it cannot account for it- 
self, if it did not make itself in the greatest intellect 
that man has ever showed, but goes back to its 
source in something infinitely more creative in power, 
surely no agency in all the mighty stream of evolu- 
tionary life can account for itself. The animal- 
cidae cannot account for themselves, nor the atoms ; 
lifeless matter cannot account for life : evolution, a 
name to cover a mystery, is itself to be accounted 
for. Nothing which is can be accounted for or ex- 
pressed by that which is less than itself. Person 
in man cannot be, without surplusage of person out 
of which man is born or evolved. 

We say cannot, not without modesty. What 
are our feeble minds in the presence of the great 
mystery? Yet think we must, and if we think at 
all, we must trust our minds. Our minds are some- 
how so made, and they follow such lines or laws of 
action, that we have to pronounce judgments of 
credible and incredible, of more or less satisfying, 
upon all kinds of propositions for the guidance of 



WHY WE SAY GOD 267 

life. My mind finds it incredible to think of force 
or matter as constructive and eternally at work apart 
from mind, purpose, will, spirit — the eternal master 
of matter and force. I find it incredible that evolu- 
tion should begin of itself. I find the proposition 
preposterous that mere evolution without directing 
mind, or purpose, or good will at the heart of it, 
should either start of itself or be found grinding out 
endless worlds with infinite populations of beings 
like us, and grinding them over again like so much 
wood pulp, without any intelligent result. I find 
it incredible that dependent life like ours could be 
born or made without independent and self-existent 
life, infinite to work its will. 

When they said that the earth rested on a tor- 
toise or a succession of tortoises, it had still to be 
asked where the first tortoise got his support. But 
my mind rests on the thought — everything rational 
urges me to it — of a Being, a Spirit, a Life, a Will, 
which is and always was, in and behind all things, 
not dependent, but sharing its life, self-existent for- 
ever. Nothing else satisfies me, nothing but a fun- 
damental Unity accounts for a man or a universe. 
When I say accounts for, I do not mean that 
there is no fringe of wonder and ultimate mystery, 
which no man has fathomed. Least of all do I 
mean that our minds can ever cease to search and 
ask questions and sound the depths. 

Our minds not only demand rationality, but they 
demand quite as much order, intelligibility, signifi- 
cance. They will not put up with nonsense as the 



268 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

result of their work. Our minds are so far to be 
respected for this. Our minds are the creations of 
the Universal Life, presumably therefore " after 
the image " of whatever greater mind brought them 
to birth. Grant the mighty conception of God with 
all that this name carries, you would expect just 
what you have — a kind of mind in man that " cries 
out for God, for the living God," and can never be 
at ease without Him. Our minds, in short, in their 
boldest demands, fit the Universe to which they be- 
long. They rest as they ought to rest, only so far 
as they find order, purpose, good will, unity, spirit, 
person, whom they may call Father. Try anything 
else or less, and the mind never can be satisfied long. 

There are those, of whom Mr. H. G. Wells is a 
popular preacher, and to whose views Bergson and 
others have given a certain support, who tell us of 
a God in process of growth, a somewhat blind cre- 
ative power, feeling his way, liable to mistake, dis- 
appointment and defeat, needing our help. May I 
suggest that this thought is a tentative and provi- 
sional effort of minds to whom the bare name of 
God has never yet conveyed any meaning, to whom 
the God of the churches has never spoken, who are 
feeling perhaps for the first time the great human 
need of a spiritual reality shining out from behind 
a world of mere successions of things? Mr. Wells 
evidently feels this need increasingly. It is a sign 
of reality as of something about to come to light, 
when the watcher among the stars observes the 



WHY WE SAY GOD 269 

drawing gravitation of the unseen planet. So it is 
a sign of awareness to reality that men's minds are 
coming to feel the drawing gravitation toward the 
unseen but living God. Their thought of God as 
making us sharers in the practical processes of civil- 
ization, and as suffering with us, being thus a more 
complete reality than an impassive God could be, is 
doubtless an echo of the older thought — at least 
as old as the splendid conception of the Suffering 
Leader in the Book of Isaiah, too rarely proclaimed 
even yet. The idea is that the richness and fullness 
of spiritual life in God or man are " made perfect 
in suffering"; that is, in sympathy. No abstract or 
lonely God can suffice. The purpose of creation as 
the work of good will is necessarily a process of 
sharing. To call men children of God is to affirm 
that we share all that we have, that the enterprise 
of life is the mighty effort of co-operation. 

Few men can long rest at ease with a partial, fee- 
ble, finite, blundering, " sweating," possibly sinning, 
deity. Better so, perhaps, than to see no God at all. 
But we find sooner or later an urgency in our minds 
that pushes out higher, wider, deeper. We cannot 
worship a finite being. The real God must see be- 
yond and above our frailties, our disappointments, 
our blundering, our frequent seeming defeat and be 
all the more patient with us. We want no child- 
God. He must be trustworthy, beyond our doubts 
and suspicions, as no half-civilized creature can be. 
He must personify integrity; in short, he must be al- 
together worshipful. But this pro tempore deity of 



270 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

the biologists has no beauty in him that he should 
be desired. He is not even up to the mark of the 
best men whom we know ! Born in time, he cannot 
be himself an original creator. Clough's lines, I 
believe, express a deeper instinct and a more normal 
faith : 

" It stablishes my soul to know that though I perish, truth 

is so; 
That howsoe'er I stray and range, whate'er I do Thou dost 

not change; 
I steadier step when I recall that though I slip, Thou dost 

not fall." 

Are there minds which have no instinctive long- 
ing to find unity and to attain themselves to unity? 
There are some who, as if turning back the normal 
process of intellectual development, offer us a sort of 
pantheon of plural powers or deities ! Mr. William 
James was fond of this suggestion, but never satis- 
fied with it. Dr. Felix Adler suggests it. But Mr. 
James in his most eloquent passages seems to say 
that unity is better than pluralism and may yet be 
discovered. And Dr. Adler's spiritual pluralism is 
in itself a sort of unity of thought, ideal, and ruling 
purpose. How shall many social wills combine, un- 
less under the urgency of a higher unifying will? 
Can there be a " principle " of goodness or harmony 
that does not subsist in, and suggest, the thought of 
a living person, the One God in whom all spiritual 
beings must find their unity? The realm of the 
spirit is one. 

It is likely that much of the shyness of mind which 



WHY WE SAY GOD 271 

men show at accepting the thought of God is the 
survival of the ancient dualism that shadowed the 
world with its fear of evil power, Ahriman or Satan, 
competing against the good Ormuzd. How could 
the Living God possess power and yet tolerate evil? 
We have ventured in previous chapters to follow 
evil into its hiding places, and we have found no- 
where a malign power or principle of evil in the uni- 
verse. We have found instead a tremendous law 
of contrast and cost and effort, of struggle and 
finiteness, without which we cannot conceive that 
man could attain the unspeakable boon of spiritual 
life. Not infinite power could abrogate this law. 
What possible holding place has any dual or plural 
thought of the world, by the side of the Unity, the 
Perfectness, the Self-Existence, of the One Person? 
The word universe is a constant witness to the ex- 
pectation and demand of the mind to discover unity 
at the heart of things. The mind itself is thus seen 
to be the child of the one unifying mind, without 
which no universe could be. The manifoldness of 
things does not tell us of unity. This unity is it- 
self the child of intelligence or good will. 

The human mind may well strain and ache before 
the vast problems of existence, of space and time, 
of eternity and self-existence. To name God, to 
believe in God, does not end or answer these rack- 
ing questions. That we still ask them is a mark not 
so much of our littleness as of the infinite nature 
within us. Grant then that, with all our faith in 



272 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

God, we look out on unsearchable depths of being. 
Is there any way of honest thought that serves our 
minds better than the way we are following, or does 
not leave the same abysses of inquiry and specula- 
tion? It is easy to doubt or ask questions. But 
thinking itself is vain except to discuss foundations, 
laws, principles, order, unity and so to construct the 
working values of life. Who will give us any other 
positive or constructive idea so real, promising, us- 
able, rational, beautiful, the fit basis for such practi- 
cal life, ethics, institutions and religion; so harmoni- 
ous with the broadest teachings of nature, of human 
history, of personal experience, as is the thought of 
God, set forth and pursued from old time by the 
most comprehensive of thinkers, sung by great poets, 
lifting also the minds of multitudes of modest and 
true-hearted men and women, and establishing in 
them courage and hope ! Find us anything else 
half so persuasive ! No one has done it. Why not, 
then, believe in God, as our souls urge us to do? 
This, I think, is the voice of the highest reason. 

Moreover, we find profound hints and suggestions 
about God — the Universe Life — in ourselves, as 
we should expect, if in some true sense we are its 
children. Thus we find in ourselves a curious fact 
of doubleness. There is first the outside, or grow- 
ing self, swaying in its growth between pleasure and 
pain, between good and evil, success and failure — 
the little self, seen in varying aspects and processes. 
Underneath this appears a certain kernel of reality, 
a sort of impersonal self, with which we have to be- 



WHY WE SAY GOD 273 

come slowly acquainted; in the presence of which, 
like an alter ego, we possess for the time stability, 
confidence, harmony; without which, at least in these 
glimpses of a higher being within us, we could not 
be fully men; that is, our best selves. In our best 
friends, in the most complete and noble lives, we 
catch gleams behind the veil, of the same fact of a 
sort of second alter ego wiser and better than that 
which shows itself on the surface. The gleam of 
this better self marks the ground of our friendship 
and reverence for them. That in ourselves which 
is constant, true, honest, which demands confidence, 
sympathy and permanence, finds in the other endur- 
ing reality that it needs. Too often the outer, 
smaller self is not alive and awake and " all there " 
in its work; it flickers like a candle. The other is 
always the same: one with conscience, one with 
reason, one with good will. Though it reveals it- 
self by gleams and moments — in the highest experi- 
ences of life — it also transcends all that we expe- 
rience and assures us of infinite reserves of reality 
beyond ourselves or the greatest of human friends. 

This fact of the doubleness in ourselves — the 
little changing or phenomenal self, and the real and 
stable self, the spiritual kernel, is suggestive of what 
thoughtful men mean in speaking of God sometimes, 
as at one and the same time " immanent " in life 
and again as " transcendent." On one side is a uni- 
verse groaning and travailing in pain, the world of 
happenings and phenomena. But God is immanent 
in it. It could not be at all without him. He is 



274 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

immanent or present in everything that moves. 
But on this side, the side of finite and growing things, 
the side of manifestation, picture and parable, he 
is not altogether present, any more than he was in 
the story of Moses' vision on Mt. Sinai. Things, 
finiteness, childishness, cannot contain him. The 
highest men of Moses' time could see law, but they 
could not understand God as Love, greater than 
law. The price to be paid for that which grows 
is that it begins with only a particle of power, or 
beauty or sense or will or reality. As it grows with 
the light, enough is given us daily to urge us to hun- 
ger and thirst after more. Every parent or teacher 
knows how this is. You cannot give your child your 
full thought, but only so much broken thought as 
his mind may need. 

This inevitable finiteness is another aspect of what 
we call " evil " : it is what Browning calls " the 
blessed evil." The world, as it is now, lives through 
the breath of the immanent God, but it hardly sees 
anything real and complete : it sees only through the 
haze of its finiteness. God is in the wind, but this 
is only a bit of his power. God is in the fire and the 
earthquake, but his beauty is not visible yet; life 
from God is in the serpent with its beautiful mo- 
tion and the splendid colors of its skin, and in the 
clear white teeth of the wolf, but his goodness can- 
not be there. God is in the fierceness of the battle 
as the driving energy, but man's awful rage is the 
minus sign of reality. They are not men yet, who 
do such things to each other; good will born of 



WHY WE SAY GOD 275 

God makes the man; the want of good will is the 
mark of the beast. The evil in every case is that 
God in his power, beauty, wisdom, justice, mercy, 
sympathy, is not all there in the animal life, in the 
child, in the savage, in the half-civilized nations. 
You cannot have God for nothing, or till you become 
able with open mind and heart to receive and long 
for him in the amplitude of his truth and goodness. 
This thought steers clear away from the idea that 
God is evolving and growing. His world has to 
grow, as you and I grow. It is we who must 
grow till we find how utterly hollow life is without 
God. 

The transcendent God, the constant, the real, the 
perfect, is above and beyond finite growth. The 
best and real self, the kernel of reality in me, which 
flashes itself upon me at times, does not grow. It 
seems rather as if it were always there in its integrity 
from young childhood upward, prompting wonder- 
ful questions, watching while I slept, patient when 
I went astray, ever ready to clasp me to a closer 
harmony between my little finite growing self and 
the reality of the Universe. 

We have observed already that prayer — if prayer 
is the right word to use — is within us. Just so far 
as you or I commit ourselves to the living God 
within, so far power and peace possess us, and make 
us impregnable and indestructible. But this is no 
mere formula to recite. It means education for 
life; it means continual practice and a whole new 
range of beautiful habits. 



Ill 

THE ETERNAL LIFE 

" GOD CREATED MAN TO BE IMMORTAL AND MADE HIM TO 
BE AN IMAGE OF HIS OWN ETERNITY." 

Can there be a good religion without any idea of 
immortality? I think not, and I wish to show why. 
But we must make the approach to this answer in al- 
most a new manner and attitude. We must not try 
to argue a case and expect the kind of demonstration 
that compels the mind. You can tell amply enough 
why you love your friend, but your excellent reasons 
may not make another person feel as you do. We 
have no signs or wonders to adduce. They would 
themselves need proof. Without being so dogmatic 
as to deny the possibility of historic or objective evi- 
dence, such as many claim to find in resurrection 
stories and other forms of intercourse with the de- 
parted, I frankly confess that these things do not 
appeal to me as establishing the marvelous fact of 
eternal life. If we men can share such a majestic 
form of existence, it must be because we are already 
in the way of enjoying it. Must it not itself be the 
core of reality within us, and grow out of experiences 
in our earth? It is a fact now, in some sense and 
some measure, if it ever can be a fact. Voices and 

276 



THE ETERNAL LIFE 277 

apparitions and mediumships can no more establish 
it than the lack of them could take it away. 

In short, I am more interested in the facts and 
the reality which we find now than in the future 
which may grow out of these facts. I doubt 
whether a night was ever spent in alleged converse 
with the spirits of the dead that compares with 
many a day, when in the light of this present earth 
a man at his best sees the world at its best, and 
echoes the ancient word, "Behold, it is good!" 
The stoutest believers in the resurrection of the 
dead are in no haste, we observe, to exchange this 
earth for heaven! I do not see that they possess 
any more precious certainty about a future life than 
I have, or enjoy a happier hope with regard to it. 
Let us frankly call it hope, and not assurance, in 
which case it would not be hope. 

On the other hand, as I approach the mystic cur- 
tain, from beyond which I never saw a man re- 
turn, the considerations that move my mind to a 
deepening and restful hope become extremely im- 
pressive. Let me try briefly to express this hope. 

I think of death as bringing us no harm; it is nec- 
essary; it is in the great plan of life; I would not 
choose, if I could, to be exempt from it; it seems to 
hold a place for good and not for evil. Let it dis- 
solve my body; though I now possess my body, I do 
not think of it as myself. The body is a thing, or a 
composite of many things, which I can weigh and 
measure. No one can weigh and measure me; I 
am not a thing, but a person. I must say spirit, for 



278 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

want of any other term to describe the inward real- 
ity which can know itself, with which I have become 
somewhat acquainted through all the years of my 
life, which still at its best strikes me anew with its 
wonder. I find no particle of evidence that death 
can touch me. I do not belong to the dissoluble 
realm of death. As a learned scientific friend once 
remarked, it is quite conceivable that life might go 
on in the atmosphere of the sun, and if life at all, 
then happy and significant life. I cannot indeed 
comprehend by what kind of bridge I may be made 
to pass from this form of life to another. How 
should I understand? I do not in the least under- 
stand the processes and stages of life and thought 
through which I have thus far come. The fact of 
my own birth into this world is as great a " miracle " 
to me as the birth of a Christ was ever thought 
to be. 

Meanwhile, ever since clearness of consciousness 
awoke in me, I have seemed like one set here to fight 
under the flag of an infinite and unseen, yet impres- 
sively felt and realized spirit or master of life, with 
whom I bear kinship. The net result and interpre- 
tation of all my experiences bring me pretty solidly 
to this conviction. I find nothing else so solid; I 
return to this after letting my mind roam as it may 
in every direction. No words or definitions are 
enough, but what can I say more accurately to ex- 
press my thought than that I find myself a sort of 
heir-apparent, the creation or child of the ruling 
life-force of the world? Is not the name — Father 



THE ETERNAL LIFE 279 

Almighty — as good as any name can be? In the 
light of this thought playing on all the facts, death 
is only a servant or a means of the Master of Life 
— a negative thing at the most. Here and now I 
belong to the realm of life and spirit. Neither can I 
see anything so intelligent to do as to hold firm to 
the last my faith in Life, the reality. When I die, 
I am bound, as the great Roman Emperor said, to 
" die standing," that is, with my face still toward 
the eternal and beautiful things, life and light. 
Why should I act and think for seventy years as if 
life, and more life, not death, were before me, and 
change over and turn my back upon life ! The ac- 
tion of light on my mind, the facts brought to light 
afford no ray of reason why I should change the di- 
rection of my life. This I say in general; it is not 
the most that I can say, but the least, or that which 
I can always say in the face of the blackest demons 
of doubt and denial. They fall back before this 
view of the subject. 

I go on to state not arguments, with which men 
dispute, but the immense considerations which move 
me, and especially when I am at my best, with my 
heart and soul and mind working in accord. These 
same considerations also tend to call me to my best, 
when on occasion I have fallen away. 

In the first place, this idea of life as lord over 
death, life the reality and death its shadow, life con- 
tinuous and death an incident, is harmonious with 
everything else most significant in the universe. It 
fits the nature of the universe, itself ultimately a 



280 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

meaningful harmony and unity. Even our bodies 
dissolving never dissolve into nothingness, but rather 
go on again into the material world out of which 
the building life evolved them; they still have their 
uses. Shall the spiritual selves which this material 
only served alone perish! This does not fit, or 
match with, the worth and unity of the universe. 
Fitness or harmony is a test of the truth and whole- 
ness of things, as emptiness or ugliness is a mark of 
untruth or partialness. A universe calls for the idea 
of significance. Shall it grind on forever for noth- 
ing? This is to do less than its creatures, which 
would be to fail. Shall it produce its most notable 
fruitage only to destroy it? This is not worthy of 
the marvelous cost and glory of its processes. This 
is to do worse despite to its heroes and saints than 
their enemies could ever do. For while their ene- 
mies thought enough of them to abuse them, and 
put them to death, the great mother life, on this 
shocking supposition, does not care enough for them, 
or see sufficient use in them, to give them tenantcy 
in her vast spaces. I say the mind cannot abide 
this disharmony! 

I say nothing about the supposed desire of men, 
born in them, for continuance of life. This may 
mean little or nothing; it varies in different persons, 
being often quite slight. It may be nothing more 
than the life-instinct to keep on, which the dumb 
creatures share with us. But a deeper fact lies be- 
hind it; namely, the congruity of the idea of eternal 
life with the nature, and especially the spiritual real- 



THE ETERNAL LIFE 281 

ity in us. This best in us hungers for use and serv- 
ice; herein is its life. This desire is not only in the 
few; it is in the hearts of the many. We can endure 
hurts, disappointments, sorrows, and bear ourselves 
still as men and be happy, provided we have worth 
in the world. This deep craving to count for some- 
thing worth while, to do for the universe, as all 
other lower orders of creatures do something, not 
merely to live upon its bounty, but to enrich its life, 
is of the spiritual nature. I hold it to be of pro- 
phetic significance. But what if nature herself, set- 
ting the mark of annihilation upon us, pronounces 
us useless? What if nature, so infinitely full of re- 
sources in this finite earth, can find nothing worth 
while for us to be or do and only stupidly dismisses 
us ! This reduces nature to the level of vulgar friv- 
olity. Not for our own sake, but for the sake of 
the universe, to which we belong, we should be 
ashamed of it. 

Some one may say, Is it not enough, both worthy 
and useful, for brave and true men to go on living 
in their children, or in the composite life of hu- 
manity? Does not George Eliot's " Choir Invis- 
ible " with its call to let self go and serve the un- 
known future of mankind thrill one's soul? But if, 
as this implies, our great memories and ideals are 
reality, must it not be that the universe which created 
them rings true? What then if this shadowy earth 
immortality runs out after a few more millenniums 
into the weary and hopeless old age of the planet, 
and the stark wraith of death stands ready to swal- 



282 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

low all life at the end. Would not this be ultimate 
defeat? The glorious life-power that has brought 
us here to share its nature, has created us to be hon- 
est, to be real and sober-minded, and to expect 
truth, not mockery, as the outcome of its costly proc- 
esses. 

We strike here upon one of the most marvelous 
thoughts in man's mind, itself the creation or child 
of the universe. We carry a notion of the infinite 
and eternal. It is one of the uppermost products 
of the growth of our manhood. We cannot abide 
finite limits, at least in our thought. We straight- 
way overpass the finite and cry out for that which 
is beyond. We seem therein to belong to the na- 
ture of the infinite; that is, of spirit, mind, thought, 
goodness. Bring us then to the brink of the death 
of the material world and let us there face an im- 
passable gulf — the hopeless passing into nothing- 
ness of every object of worth, the old earth dead, 
death ruling a vacancy; and we stand back with only 
a more severe shock of abhorrence than we felt at 
the supposition of the annihilation of the individual 
life. The wonder of the processes of life over 
against their futility! The power and intelligence 
so infinite, and the product so empty! Every- 
where below the lesser goes on and up to serve the 
greater, and the greater learns to serve the humble, 
but here at last all goes for nothing! Everywhere 
below stands forth the thought of use and service, 
inspiring human lives, but the unseen Power out of 
which the inspiring thought was born at last spurns 



THE ETERNAL LIFE 283 

its offspring! Even so, the matter and the force 
persist, while that which gave worth and dignity to 
their movements goes down to death! We simply 
cannot believe anything so ill of the universe; We 
cannot conceive that such intelligence as made us to 
think should prove so foolish. 

Thus every time we stand at the fork of the roads 
and look down the path that forebodes ultimate 
death, our minds are thrown back by an instinct of 
overwhelming revulsion, as if the life in our souls 
called it forth, and we seem to be commanded by the 
" Power not ourselves " to take the open way again 
upward toward the infinite hope and life. We can- 
not take any other way and live and think worthily. 
We must respect the world we live in. We must 
think its guiding life from which we spring grander, 
better, more utterly trustworthy than we ourselves 
are. In short, we must think that, in some deep 
sense, God cares and will always care for us. We 
come to care too much for God not to think this of 
Him. Herein, again, the parts match and fit, as 
truth requires. The inner nature meets and rests 
in the nature of God! 

A second impressive consideration which urges my 
mind toward the hope of the immortal life is the fact 
of the stupendous and endless possibilities here and 
now with which life, and specially the life of the 
mature man, is crowded. The utmost attainments 
of the most advanced men never come up with these 
infinite openings into the future in every branch of 
thoughtful life — the possibilities of invention and 



284 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

discovery, of science in its ever-widening depart- 
ments, of the uses of the earth and everything in it, 
its flowers and fruits, its beauties of scenery in every 
climate, its wonders of the desert and the ocean. 
But most of all we are becoming aware of inner 
possibilities even in the average man, such as he has 
hardly touched, the possibilities in the realm of the 
spirit, of friendships, mutual aid, co-operation, the 
construction of the commonwealth of the nations. 
Such is the nature of the world and its life, as in 
this stormiest of earth weather we survey the pros- 
pect that gleams through the clouds. We are still a 
world of children, only beginning to come into our 
heritage. 

Now, all that we know about the world and life 
gives us trust and hope, as in Emerson's thought, to- 
ward what we do not yet know. For the universe is 
of a piece. It does not yield flowers and beauty 
only so far as our short sight can follow, but it 
startles us with the delicacy and perfectness of the 
tiniest objects that we had never noticed before. 
Suns and stars ever appear beyond the familiar con- 
stellations. It is a world of constructive surprises. 
The trend of all is in one way toward not merely 
the meeting of natural expectations, but on toward 
the unexpected and transcendent. Nature is always 
the miracle-worker. She changes the evil to good; 
she shows us her secret of turning our seeming evil 
to the credit of the real and permanent. 

She has shown us what can be done with disease, 
with fire and flood, with seeming defeat. She has 



THE ETERNAL LIFE 285 

opened all sorts of vistas from the scene of our 
blunders and crimes, and used evil for her sublime 
purpose of a better manhood. Shall we now think 
that all this stops at the gate of death? Have the 
grand prophecies fallen true beyond the visions of 
Amos or Isaiah, and shall all prophecies perish at 
the touch of final death? Did the possibilities of 
the universe for the growth of the perfect life cul- 
minate in one man, once for all, only to come to 
naught, and pass away, when Jesus hung upon the 
cross? Again, as before, there appears a portal of 
prophecy, bigger than man ever saw, bidding us say 
with Paul: "We know not what we shall be." 
And we know, " if God be for us nothing can be 
against us." 

I have made nothing of the element of justice — 
of due rewards and punishments for those who are 
either supposed not to have had a fair chance in 
this world, or else to have had more than their share. 
Thus in the Old Testament much has been made of 
the need of a future life to straighten out the crooked 
balances of this world. The lofty must be brought 
down and the lowly must be exalted. This does not 
greatly appeal to me. Who can claim that he de- 
serves anything of the universe? So far as we de- 
serve at all I suspect that we get what we deserve 
as we go along and more besides. But I do not 
mean pay or rewards such as please the children — 
medals, prizes, praises and marks; or what older 
children desire — money and station. This world 



286 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

is not a series of great competitive Olympic games; 
a few big contestants and many spectators : it is 
not a mercantile establishment offering bargains; 
neither is it a penal colony where most are doomed 
to suffer. It is a world of opportunity and for 
all. Does the Lord of life do the best possible 
for all? This is the great question touching the jus- 
tice of the universe. 

It is a bold faith no doubt to say Yes, but I see 
nothing more rational to say in view of the dense 
limits of this finite earth within which omnipotence 
itself must work in bringing creatures, born of the 
dust, to the wonderful heights of companionship 
with God. I am content with this as my hope. 
The practical question with every man is: Am I 
doing my part to co-operate with that higher spiritual 
life acting within me to rear a man? Never a step 
in this way upward that does not bring its own char- 
acteristic reward! Not a fortune and a round of 
pleasure, but maturity and integrity are the fitting 
reward of the growing child. Spiritual maturity for 
the largest possible number is reward enough for all 
the labors and sorrows of man. But spiritual ma- 
turity belongs to the realm of the eternal. How can 
it suffer death? 

Another fact that impresses me overwhelmingly 
is the nature of that strange but most vital quality 
that we call hope. It is a life factor in some form 
from our cradles upward. Not to possess it is not 
fully to live, and therefore not to be strong or well or 
good for much. Of course it is always subtly chang- 



THE ETERNAL LIFE 287 

ing its object as we grow more intelligent. With 
the child it lights upon bright things and is selfish 
accordingly. But what wonderful effects it pro- 
duces, what deeds of daring and courage and endur- 
ing life it can put forth, when it rises to the sight of 
the spiritual values of love, comradeship, passion for 
justice and truth, the undying ideals of a noble hu- 
manity which alone satisfy its quite infinite depths. 
Thus the hope of the discoverer plus the hope of the 
lover of men gave Livingstone a sort of charmed 
life in his lonely wanderings in the heart of Africa. 
Nothing can daunt this kind of man. This purely 
spiritual faculty of hope shows itself over and over 
in all human experience, blazing up into illustrious 
deeds, into poetry and art, to be one of man's great- 
est assets. 

Hope, however, like all the spiritual faculties, 
cannot bear barriers or limits. It cries out for the 
infinite, for the open sky, for the sight of the stars, 
and for stars beyond stars. Give it that which it 
seeks and it looks for more and better. Give it the 
joys of youth and it seeks the ampler business and 
achievements of manhood. Give it earth and it 
seeks for heaven too. It will not be baffled. Close 
one path and it sees light to find another and better. 
Is this only man's conceit? No, hope runs freest 
when it is clearest of conceit or selfishness. It would 
not take immortal life as a gift for itself, but its 
hope is for love's sake; it is as wide as humanity. 

Poverty, whether of material things, or of low 
spirits, is the absence of hope. The pitiful popula- 



288 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

tions of the earth are the hopeless ones. Set a new 
hope in their hearts and they will answer to the 
command of life and grow strong and rich. Give 
the sick man a new prospect, offer him hope of a 
worthier life, and you will have done for him more 
than medicine can. 

But the hopes of men, says the cynic, are so fool- 
ish and thoughtless ! Such indeed are the hopes of 
the childish. What else would you expect? Better 
so than no hope at all. Hope at its highest, how- 
ever, marches with thought and reason to construct 
and to find integrity. Not the idle and foolish but 
the wise and whole-hearted are the men and women 
of hope. It is because hope cannot be satisfied with 
the material, the low and unreal, that it sets us on 
the track of the spiritual, the infinite and eternal. 
It was because John Stuart Mill could not stop 
thinking, that his nicely finished earthly paradise dis- 
appointed him. What of it? Though you feed 
and clothe and house every one abundantly, what 
good is it, unless you can see the infinite something 
beyond — a spiritual manhood and womanhood 
worthy enough for the multitude of your comfort- 
able inhabitants? 

Some minds indeed are content for a while with 
the vague and indefinite. The masterful lad filled 
with his visions of the life here and now does not 
care to hear you discourse on the problem of Eternal 
Life. The eager socialist worker is possessed for 
the present with his dreams of happy economic ad- 



THE ETERNAL LIFE 289 

justments. The infinite hope to live and count for 
something useful is met for a time with the indefinite 
joy of the " great renunciation." Let me die, if 
only I may 

" join the choir invisible 

Of those immortal dead who live again 

In minds made better by their presence." 

Nevertheless, straight thinking at last brings the in- 
evitable question: Is this grand "choir immortal" 
truly immortal or not? We think of those who 
come after us, our children to be, in the age when 
the earth, grown slightly older, faces its last glacial 
cold or fatal explosion. What hope will the choir 
invisible offer against the last days? We gladly 
toil for their sakes who follow us that they may have 
ampler life than we enjoy, and the hope of grander 
reality. But how shall it come except in the realm 
of infinite spiritual reality? Thus, our thought for- 
ever binds up our growing hope with the prophecy 
of infinite and spiritual life. I cannot think that the 
creating nature has made hope to be a factor and a 
test of life power, and made it grow and rise always 
toward a higher and abiding life and linked it into 
the very substance of our spiritual health, only at 
last to prove a delusion, good only for childish be- 
ings, and worthless for men. I can be cheated with 
vain hopes, while on my way to discover perchance 
the indestructible reality, but I cannot think so 
meanly of the creative life as to believe it will cheat 
us out of the ultimate hope. For this ultimate 



290 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

hope is itself of the substance of life. It arises out 
of the ground of the " grand renunciation" to die 
to live I 

We know one solid fact. There have been human 
lives worthy to go on and to live: a single Christ- 
life is a stupendous act of Creative Will. But not 
one Christ story alone illuminates history. Such 
stories of the great and the humble are everywhere 
known, and never so many as now. No corrupt and 
materialist earth blocks their splendid growth. 
Visit any library and view the shelves of the biog- 
raphies of the men and women who have made 
human life most beautiful. It is always the story — 
whether of statesmen or good physicians or fearless 
prophets or honest men of affairs or good teachers, 
and gracious women, of the outburst of spiritual life. 
The terms and words of the realm of the spirit 
describe them and mark the quality of their accom- 
plishments. As a rule they are men of faith, hope 
and love — the three great conditions of the life 
of men at their best. If all lives were like these 
lives, who could deny that God created man to be 
immortal? Could you think that men are no more 
than flies in the records of time, that they die as 
flies die, and that out of the most beautiful and 
meaningful fruitage of the universe nothing persists? 
At any rate, some of our brethren have been infi- 
nitely worthy. They companioned with God and 
co-operated with him. Why should they not still 



THE ETERNAL LIFE 291 

serve the spirit in whom they live ? Through them, 
we say, as Matthew Arnold said of his father, we 
believe " in the noble and great who are gone," 

" Souls tempered with fire, 
Fervent, heroic and good, 
Helpers and friends of mankind." 

We believe in them as Sons of God, that is, of the 
Eternal Reality. Neither are these great souls 
alone. The commonest man has it in him to know 
and appreciate the same quality of life. Yes, to 
respond to its call. Its kernel is in him. Every 
village has the story of his kind. Deathless hope 
blossoms out of such facts. 

The master-thought of evolution is very sugges- 
tive at this point. We have observed that the way 
of evolution is by stages and periods. Something 
occurs on the way up that had not been apparent 
before. No finite thought could have predicted 
what would come forth from the Infinite Mind, when 
conscious life first throbbed, or when man first stood 
erect and walked, or when love gave its first smile 
out of a woman's eyes, or when men first learned to 
forgive. These are divers forms of the rising life. 
Who can help, after looking backward and tracing 
the path ever up toward spiritual fulfillment, to ask, 
What next? Have we men seen all? What may 
be beyond this strange screen through which we all 
pass? It must be worthy of the Power that brought 
us so far. Must it not be interpreted then in terms 
of life ? Nothing else seems worthy of the universe. 



292 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

Do they not then travel the wrong way in their 
thought who bear stress upon the material and in- 
fantile beginnings of man? The path of evolution 
is ever on toward more profound satisfactions. 
Look back all you please, but you know nothing till 
you come where the past and the present and the 
future are bound into unison. 

This thought, for its very bigness, makes us satis- 
fied that we cannot know what the next stage will be 
like. How could we know, who never knew before- 
hand what any great human experience would be 
like, or what it would do to us! The Master Poet 
mind of the world, the Dramatist of Creation, al- 
ways goes beyond our small imaginings. For this 
reason, if for no other, we may well be shy of such 
tidings and descriptions of another life as grow out 
of strange psychological experiments in darkened 
parlors. Are they quite worthy of that which may 
soon be enacted at the hand of him to whom " all 
things are possible " ? For the whole universe 
seems to be linked together as if with a great prom- 
ise to bring to pass in due time whatever is most 
desirable for the children of God. Now the one 
and only thing of which we can assuredly say that 
it is desirable, is spiritual life and ever more of it. 

Meanwhile, it is for us to learn to the last breath 
how better to speak the universal language which we 
conceive would make us at home as citizens wherever 
real life is. This universal language is in the terms 
of faith, hope and love. Who has these must live, 
we believe, as God lives. 



THE ETERNAL LIFE 293 

What, now, is the result in human life, if a man 
fairly tries and practices, however provisionally, the 
hope of immortality? The mind itself, finding no 
reason to the contrary, recommends this conduct. 
Try the beautiful thought as a mere " perhaps." 
Try it as you would try a new mode of motion or a 
new experience. 

Dr. Washington Gladden once published a little 
essay, " The Practice of Immortality." He meant 
this of which I am speaking. Live as an immortal 
being would live, and go on living so till you have to 
stop. This proves to be an exquisite mode of life to 
every one who tries it. You who hold the vast hope 
are more and greater men than you ever were before. 
You have greater volume of life within you; you 
treat all other men likewise as heirs of immortality; 
you respect them more ; you behave better to them. 
You who have this hope can wrong no man, hate no 
one, despise no one. Thus enlarged in richness of 
life, you can do nothing unworthy; you are taken up 
into habits of thought beyond fear. You are ready 
for all good endeavor. You seem to share the pres- 
ence of God. 

Is not this way of life, then, which fits and matches 
and relates itself to a whole, and draws from new 
sources of power and opens vistas of ever more 
loving, social and useful action, in all probability 
true? It certainly works for the increase and 
heightening of life. It either means something real 
or it means nothing. Does not the reason itself put 
its seal upon it? Try the opposite way. I live for 



294 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

a while as if death ended all. The skies of my life 
darken. I am less a man than I was before. I 
cannot possibly think so well of other men. I ap- 
proach the permanent attitude of the pessimist and 
cynic. I find this course neither livable nor think- 
able. I proceed again to cherish this great normal 
hope and I find myself in the way of life ! 

But what if I knew that death ended all? What 
if facts and the reason could set up a final verdict 
of " No thoroughfare " against the gate of death. 
I do not see how this could be done. But suppose it. 
Should we say now, " Let us eat and drink, for to- 
morrow we die"? Certainly not. No one who 
has once learned to live the good life, no one who 
has tasted its characteristic quality, no one who has 
seen the vision of spiritual integrity can forsake his 
manhood and debase himself to sensuality. He will 
still have to live as if life and God and truth, duty 
and love were real. Even if a future life were not 
to be, we men have known the facts of the eternal 
life. We have found them to be real. They hold 
us in their firm and kindly bonds. This is a mar- 
velous fact of experience. It is the old idea : 
Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him. How 
can any one account for it except as we are compelled 
to reverse the verdict of death, and accept Life and 
Love as Lord of All ! Thus immortality seems to 
be an inseparable part of the fabric of the universe. 

I say, then, if I could know there were no 
Guiding Life or Higher Power than man, and no 
life beyond or above this physical life, I should 



THE ETERNAL LIFE 295 

still see nothing so good as to go on trying to live 
the life of my ideals. I should not curse the uni- 
verse as evil. But this is not to say that I could 
ever again live at my best, as I now know this best. 
My thought and estimate of the universe, my valua- 
tion of life, my respect for myself and my own worth, 
my regard for others and my conception of their 
value would be unalterably changed. I should live 
in a different universe, less worth while, with men 
less worthy, with a rather morbid temperament drag- 
ging upon me. I should have no happy buoyancy, 
no enthusiasm, no gladsome abandon to a grand 
purpose. It would be the difference between one 
foreseeing shipwreck at the end of his voyage and 
one who expected to land and meet his friends. 
Foreseeing the fatal end, much would seem to me 
futile to attempt which in the other case I should 
heartily undertake as a natural part of the journey 
and the fulfillment of its purpose. My feelings to- 
ward my fellow voyagers would be a thinner kind 
of comradeship. 

Let me venture to sum up what I have wished to 
say. I cannot look upon either our belief in God or 
the hope of immortality as simple ideas, seen at a 
glance by what men call " intuition." They are 
complex, and proceed as a conclusion or resultant 
of the experiences of life. This is why many minds 
fail to accept them immediately. They are hardly 
possible as the outcome of an evil or selfish career. 
How should they be? They are more likely to 



296 A RELIGION FOR THE NEW DAY 

come from a life of definite ethical or spiritual move- 
ment. Why should they not ? Why should I think 
well of a world to which I had turned the worse side 
of me, and blurred my vision of its realities? 

Meanwhile, I cannot live a life neutral between 
faith and doubt, touching subjects so immense in 
their reaction upon character and life. If God is; 
if in some sense, dim or clear, life and not death 
is the answer to the riddle of the world, it is wonder- 
ful news. Every one who loves his fellow must wish 
that this may be true. Every one must on occasion 
in the grand crises of life press a little way beyond 
bare agnosticism toward the region where light 
shines. Let me begin, then, with as much as a tiny 
" perhaps " to this immense possibility. Why not? 
If I say as much as this in sincerity, it acts at once 
to change my character, my interpretation of events, 
my temper, my purpose, my destiny, all distinctly in 
the direction of fuller, stronger, happier life. It 
does this without militating, so far as I can see, 
against my normal openness of mind. Indeed, it 
binds me to a supreme regard for truth and integ- 
rity. Now I propose to go on in this course to the 
uttermost. Has God no further use for me when 
I part from this body? Is there no room in the 
universe at last? Be it so. I would not live upon 
the charity of the universe. But what I know of the 
universe compels me to think well of it. I have 
found astounding good in it. If God wills, " I shall 
arrive." It looks like a splendid adventure. We 
now seem to be only at the beginning of the spiritual 



THE ETERNAL LIFE 297 

life of mankind. After us must come multitudes of 
more thoughtful, better and more useful men, who 
will surpass a generation reared in squalor, poverty 
and strife. They shall possess a stouter faith, a 
warmer hope matching a wider humanity, with insti- 
tutions rich and adequate to serve them. Holding 
the secret of wisdom, they shall rule and use the 
world without abusing it. The fear of death shall 
be taken from their eyes. 



THE END 



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